The victory of Emmanuel Macron in the French ballotage opened the battle for the legislatures

After the victory of liberal Emmanuel Macron in the presidential elections, opponents and macronists rushed this Sunday to appeal to the French to mobilize in the legislative elections in June, in which the president would need to have a majority of deputies to implement his program.

“Legislative elections will be important to allow the president to continue acting,” said government spokesman Gabriel Attal, the first to open the battle for the future formation of the National Assembly, in an intervention on the TF1 network.

The far-right Marine Le Pen, who wanted to see in her defeat “a form of hope” and the “aspiration for great change”, warned against “the high risk that Macron will seize all the springs of the executive and legislative power.”

To avoid this, in his speech after learning the results, he called on all those “who want to join forces against” Macron to work together in the June elections, symbolically considered “the third round”.

Tertullian extremist Éric Zemmour, who after losing in the first round of April 10 asked for the vote for Le Pen in this second round, said he wanted to lead a union of right-wing parties ahead of the formation of the National Assembly in June. “Those who love France passionately have been defeated for too long. Those who want to defend their identity and end immigration have long been bitterly disappointed on election night,” Zemmour said.

The call was joined by Le Pen's niece, Marion Maréchal, and two other ultras, Guillaume Peltier and Nicolas Bay.

After the fracture of the vote revealed in the first round, on April 10, the far right is not the only one calling for alliances.

“The 'third round' starts tonight. You can defeat Macron and choose another path if you give him a majority of deputies to the People's Union, which must be enlarged,” said leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who placed third in the first round of these elections, barely 400,000 votes less than Le Pen.

In a televised statement, minutes after the presidential winner was known, Mélenchon called on the left to expand its base and join forces. “I urge all the forces of the democratic left that has managed to stop the worst, to join today for a new left to lead the fighting of the future, starting with that of the legislative elections,” socialist Anne Hidalgo wrote on Twitter, who won less than 2% in the first round.

The thirteen million votes collected by Le Pen, to which historical abstention figures of 28% are added and that nearly 9% of the votes counted are white or void, led opposition leaders to mobilize their respective camps to try to remove the current majority from the Macronist party.

In the traditional right wing, which suffered a severe blow in the first round by falling below the 5% that allows the state to reimburse the expenses of the electoral campaign, the leader of the Republicans, Christian Jacob, argued that “the battle of legislative elections opens today.”

“Unlike the presidential majority, we have settled deputies, who know their territories. A new campaign begins,” said Jacob, who saw in the votes of extremism “a warning cry” and “a vow of despair.”

With information from EFE

KEEP READING: