Macron rivals warn against parliamentary monopoly

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The first round of the legislative elections took place on Sunday, with early results on Monday suggesting the new centrist party led by Macron has won 32.32%, ahead of nearest challengers Les Républicains on 21.56% and Marine Le Pen's Front National on 13.20%.

But turnout was sharply down, at 48.7 per cent compared with 57.2 per cent in the first round in 2012, which analysts said reflected a sense of resignation among Macron's opponents.

To win a seat in the first round of voting, candidates had to win more than half of the votes, which must account for at least a quarter of the registered voters.

The centre-right Republicans received slightly less than 16 per cent of the vote, while the Socialists, which was previously the ruling party, took 7.4 per cent and are projected to lose as many as 230 seats.

The fact that one out of every two French voters stayed away from the polls helped Macron and hurt the parties that had already been strongly battered during the presidential elections.

Following the first result of parliamentary competition's first leg, LREM and its allies were likely to win between 415 and 455 seats out of the 577-seat lower house of parliament, securing a landslide majority. He has drawn candidates from a cross-section of society, including a former bullfighter, a Nobel Prize victor and an ex-fighter pilot.

Returns showed that the National Front would take about 13.5 percent of the vote, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon's leftist France Unbowed Party was expected to win just 11 percent.

Mr. Macron's party has largely avoided controversy but one of his ministers who is running for re-election in Brittany, Richard Ferrand, is being probed over a property deal involving his girlfriend.

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Mary Ruediger, 45, was visiting her parents who live along an access road to the golf course and spotted the blimp going down. I think there is nothing that I can hide by it, but I've got to go out there and focus harder and try to get it done.

Less than 50 percent of the 47.5 million electors cast ballots - showing that Macron has limited appeal to many voters.

"It is not healthy that a president who gathered 24 percent of votes in the first round of the presidential election has a monopoly in the assembly", Cambadelis said, referring to Macron's score in April.

The final result will be declared in the second round of voting next Sunday.

A swath of senior Socialists, including former government ministers, lost their seats in the first round.

PM Philippe admitted the "demobilisation" of voters but said that it was because the "presidential election "ended the debate" about France's political direction and that "some political forces were unable to find new energy" after the presidential vote". A parliamentary majority would give Mr. Macron a strong mandate to push through changes he promised during the campaign, which includes reforming the EU.

Macron professes to be of neither the right nor left.

Their strategy over the past days has rather been to urge voters to make sure the opposition will be big enough to have some weight in parliament.

Polling agencies project that Mr Macron's party will win a large majority in the second round. Le Pen said the country's electoral system favors larger parties and needed to be reformed. Its chief, Jean-Christophe Cambadelis, confirmed he had been eliminated from his long-held Paris seat, a symbol of his party's stunning demise after five years in power.

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