Macron eyes next stage in revolution in French parliament polls

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Just a month after the 39-year-old former banker became the youngest head of state in modern French history, pollsters forecast that his centrist La République En Marche (La REM) party will win as many as 75-80% of seats in the lower house of parliament on Sunday.

Key rivals say they expect LREM to win a majority of seats and have been urging voters to make the margin as small as possible, saying that democratic debate could otherwise be stifled.

The conservative The Republicans are expected to be the biggest opposition group in parliament.

But among those who plan to vote for La REM candidates the mood is very different, with an overwhelming feeling that Macron needs to be given a strong enough majority to carry out the policies on which he was elected just over a month ago.

It is the second-round of the election featuring run-off contests between the top candidates after the first round held last Sunday.

Turn-out will be keenly watched, with opposition parties eager to get voters to the polls after more than half the 47.6 million-strong electorate stayed away in the first round.

"This is France, not Russian Federation", far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon said Friday on Europe 1 radio. While Melenchon is known for bold talk, his words underscored worry about an eventual all-powerful Macron who, Melenchon said, "is going to end up believing he walks on water".

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Gillespie narrowly defeated Stewart in a race that truly came down to the wire and left Gillespie victorious, but only just. Northam's campaign had been expecting about 320,000 voters, similar to the last contested Democratic primary in 2009.

France's two-round voting system, used in all types of elections including the April-May presidential contest that took Macron into power, eliminates low-scoring candidates in the first round.

Jack Lang, the President of the Paris Institut du Monde Arabe, French politician and former French Minister of Culture, was optimistic about relations between Morocco and France under Emmanuel Macron in a recent interview with the Maghreb Arabe Presse.

While French voters have handed past presidents large majorities in parliament, what's different this time is that Macron's party is splitting - and therefore weakening - the opposition. The validation over Brexit that May had sought evaporated on June 8, as her party lost 13 seats after a disastrous campaign by her party and an engaging, passionate one by Labour that saw them surge by more than any party had managed in post-war Britain.

The voting system punishes parties outside the mainstream, or with no mainstream allies, like Le Pen's National Front.

Should LREM manage to secure the majority it's predicted to on Sunday, the majority would allow Macron to easily confirm his government, headed by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.

The low turnout has been disastrous for the far-right party National Front led by Marine Le Pen.

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