French Presidential Election Outcome — Will Affect National Assembly Elections — Perhaps Curiously.
Emmanuel Macron has just won the French presidential election. He defeated Marine Le Pen running for the Front National (FN) party. For the next few weeks/months Macron will be very busy learning how to be — as well as actually being — president and running a large government in a complex country. He is not going to have a lot of spare time on his hands. Also being busy will be the leaders of the various political parties as they begin to establish a coalition with a voting majority in the Assembly under the new president
The next election of members of the National Assembly occurs on 11 and 18 June, 2017. Currently the Front National party — has but two seats in the Assembly. With such few seats no other party is likely to spend time with FN leaders to discuss forming a coalition.
But given that Le Pen with the FN gathered something like a third of the vote in the presidential elections, the probability is that the party is likely to gain more seats.
The more interesting point is that there is only one person and one group of politicians with time to spare between now and mid-June. And that is Marine Le Pen and her Front National party. So while Macron and his peeps are stuck in Paris governing, Le Pen and the FN can devote all their energies to being out on the road and campaigning with full measure to win a significant number of local elections.
Personally, I am quite OK with Macron winning — though I would have been even happier with Jean-Luc Mélenchon. I certainly do not want the FN gain more seats.
I am just pointing out that there are a lot of voters — around the world it seems — who want to vote for candidates who run against the status quo. Le Pen and her peeps seem to have a clearer run to engaging these disenchanted voters. As a result the FN may gain far more significant share of the seats in the National Assembly than they have had in the past.
First published here: https://github.com/theo-armour/theo-armour.github.io/issues/6
