Will the many withdrawals make it possible to avoid an RN government?
The long-awaited figure is finally known. On Tuesday, July 2, at 6 p.m., the deadline for submitting candidacies for the second round of the legislative elections expired, and we now have the first estimates of the number of candidates for the National Assembly qualified for the second round who have withdrawn. According to a count by the newspaper “Le Monde”, there are 218. Among them, 130 come from the ranks of the New Popular Front, 82 from Ensemble and its allies, 2 from the Republicans and the Various Right and 3 from the National Rally (RN) and their allies.
The idea, for the candidates of the left and Macronists who had given up participating in three-way races (which without these withdrawals would have numbered 306) was to favor the candidate with the greatest chance of beating the RN candidate, and even before the count of withdrawals was final, The weather stressed already the crucial importance of these renunciations.
“We can already say that these abandonments could prevent France from having an absolute far-right majority, wrote the Swiss daily earlier on July 2. This Tuesday afternoon, with the withdrawals already announced, a projection gave 244 seats for the RN and its allies,” specified the French-speaking media.
The threshold for an absolute majority being 289 seats, the RN would be, according to this projection, far from having the deputies necessary to obtain an absolute majority. However, it should also be noted that The weather, “Jordan Bardella has repeatedly said that he would refuse to be prime minister in a situation of relative majority.”
However, recalls the British media BBC, “On Tuesday, Marine Le Pen qualified these remarks by saying that a smaller majority would be sufficient, provided that it was not too far from the threshold of 289 deputies. According to her, winning around 270 deputies would allow her party to start discussions with deputies from other groups in the hope of persuading them to conclude an agreement.”.
