Macron's pro-EU party set for sweeping victory in French parliamentary election

Prime Minister Edouard Phillipe, who was appointed by Mr Macron last month, announced "France is back" as the results rolled in.

French President Emmanuel Macron's centrist party is likely to win a comfortable majority in the National Assembly, two polling companies said after the first round of voting ended on Sunday night.

Macron was seeking a majority of the 577 seats for his centrist party, Republic on the Move, in the first round of voting.

With voting closed in rural areas and towns but still underway in Paris and other big cities, Belgium's public broadcaster RTBF said LREM and centre-right Modem ally had won about 30 per cent of votes - in line with opinion polls ahead of the first round.

The weak turnout will likely narrow the second-round field, because candidates need the support of 12.5 per cent of registered voters to qualify.

The runoff scheduled for next Sunday will determine the makeup of an assembly that Macron, at the start of a five-year term, needs to implement his campaign promises of boosting the economy and reducing the deficit.

That would put La Republique en Marche (LREM) within reach of an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly, with between 400 and 440 seats in the 577-seat lower house.

Mounir Mahjoubi, junior minister in charge of digital affairs, said on BFM television that voters have acknowledged that the first weeks of Mr Macron's presidency "have been exemplary" and "have allowed the French to see there is a path that suits them".

The 39-year-old's La Republique En Marche (LREM) party, is hoping to make huge gains and inflict a further blow on the country's traditional ruling parties.

Some 19.24 percent of voters had cast ballots by midday (1000 GMT), the interior ministry said, compared with 21.06 percent at the same time of day in the first round of 2012.

The party's chief Jean-Christophe Cambadelis and its failed presidential candidate Benoit Hamon both lost their seats.

Macron has enjoyed a smooth start in the five weeks since he beat far-right candidate Marine Le Pen to become France's youngest president, naming a Cabinet that crosses left-right lines and making a big impression at worldwide summits.

The FN's result showed the party struggling to rebound from Ms. Le Pen's bruising defeat by Mr. Macron in the presidential run-off.

Macron's office says he has held a series of conversations over the past week with the emir of Qatar, the king of Saudi Arabia, the Turkish president and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.

Many of those who voted for him in the presidential election, particularly left-wing voters, said they were doing so only to keep Marine Le Pen out.

The National Front is expected to take 13.1%, leaving it with between one and four seats, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon's far-left party is expected to claim between 10-20 seats after accounting for 11% of the vote.

No parliamentary group means little speaking time in the lower house and next to zero chance of chairing a committee. His party looks on course to win 70pc of the seats in the National Assembly - an astonishing outcome, one of the many election results that would have been dismissed out of hand by political experts a few months before it happened.

If the seat projections are confirmed next week, Macron will have a strong mandate to push through the ambitious labour, economic and social reforms he promised on the campaign trail.