Outcome of French legislative elections is unpredictable, one week before vote

5 months ago 12

Opinion polls published a week before France’s snap legislative election on 30 June put candidates backed by the far-right Rassemblement National and its allies in the lead, but with the vote taking place two rounds, the outcome remains highly unpredictable.

An Ipsos poll for Le Parisien and Radio France published on 22 June and an Opinion Way-Vae Solis poll for Les Échos on the same day show similar results for the first round of the French legislative elections on 30 June.

According to the Ipsos survey, 62% of French voters are expected to go to the polls on 30 June. This is a significant increase compared to the 2022 legislative elections, when only 47.5% of the electorate participated. It also represents a 10% increase compared to the recent European elections in France, where turnout was 51.5%.

This figure may change in the last week of the campaign. According to the Opinion Way-Vae Solis survey, only 9% of voters are “not at all interested” in the legislative campaign, 20% are “not very interested”, and 71% are either “very” or “somewhat” interested.

To qualify for the second round of the legislative elections on 7 July, a candidate must receive at least 12.5% of the votes of registered voters in their constituency. In theory, therefore, up to four candidates could qualify.

A higher turnout could lead to a ‘triangular’ run-off in which three candidates qualify for the second round, making predictions of the final result more complex.

Currently, the far-right alliance led by the Rassemblement National (ID) is leading the polls with between 35% and 35.5%, followed by the New Popular Front (S&D, Greens, The Left), a political alliance of socialists, ecologists, communists and the radical left, with between 28% and 29.5%, and Macron’s centrist Ensemble (Renew) with between 19.5% and 22%.

These three political alliances are most likely to reach the thresholds for “triangular” run-offs in an unpredictable number of constituencies.

It is not yet known whether the candidates with the lowest number of votes will drop out in these ‘triangular’ run-offs, and who they might decide to support.

If candidates from any of these three political alliances fail to qualify for the second round, official calls for vote transfers remain unclear.

Then there is the question of what will happen to the 7% of voting intentions for the centre-right Les Républicains party (EPP) in a run-off between the New Popular Front and Rassemblement National.

Polling at the national level is particularly complex due to the local characteristics and different local roots of each candidate in the 577 constituencies, making predictions even more difficult.

Each party aims for an absolute majority of 289 MPs in the National Assembly, but no party is guaranteed to achieve this at this stage.

(Théophane Hartmann | Euractiv.fr)