French voters returned to the polls on Sunday for a second and final round of voting to choose representatives for the 577-seat National Assembly, the country’s lower house and more important parliament.
The vote is significant for Prime Minister Macron as nationalist, anti-immigration rallies across the country look to do well and months of political gridlock are likely ahead.
France has 577 constituencies, each with one seat, covering the mainland and overseas departments and territories, as well as French citizens living abroad. France awards seats to the candidate who receives the most votes in each constituency.
In the first round of elections held a week ago, 76 legislative seats were won outright. The remaining games will advance to the finals, which will be held on Sunday.
While any number of candidates in each constituency can participate in the first round of voting, there are specific thresholds to advance to the second round. There will be three or even four candidates who receive at least 12.5% of the votes registered in their constituencies.
High voter participation resulted in more than 300 three-way runoffs after the first round of voting ended last week. But a coalition of left-wing parties and Macron’s centrist party withdrew more than 200 candidates from the three-way race to avoid splitting the vote and helping prevent the national rally from winning an outright majority. That leaves fewer than 100 games remaining in Sunday’s three games.
The person who receives the most votes in the runoff wins the contest.
Voting will end at 6pm local time (12pm ET) in most of France, but will last until 8pm in some major cities.
France’s interior ministry is expected to release preliminary results starting at 8 p.m. (2 p.m. ET), and polling agencies are expected to make national seat forecasts around the same time.
If the National Assembly and its allies, who won the most votes in the first round, win a majority in the National Assembly, Macron will have no choice but to appoint a prime minister from a far-right party. This would leave France’s domestic policy entirely in the hands of the far right and could disrupt Macron’s defense and foreign policies.
Without a clear majority, Mr Macron will have limited options on how to proceed.
He could try to forge a new alliance, but that might be challenging. The three main political blocs – the far right, the Left Alliance and Macron’s centrist coalition – have very different agendas and have in some cases expressed extreme hostility to each other.
If a working majority cannot be cobbled together, the country could be plunged into months of political gridlock or instability. Mr Macron has ruled out resigning and new legislative elections cannot be called for a year.
One possibility being discussed by analysts is the creation of a caretaker government that would handle the day-to-day affairs of the country until a political breakthrough occurs, as has happened in Belgium. But it also departed from French tradition.
