Main parties fret over parliament elections after Macron’s victory

NEW MOVE: Large parties are struggling to maintain leverage over Macron -

PARIS: France’s Socialist Party and the wider political Left splintered on Wednesday as centrist Emmanuel Macron’s presidential victory triggered power-struggles between moderates and hardliners ahead of June parliamentary elections.

Benoit Hamon, the unsuccessful Socialist Party candidate in the presidential contest, said he would set up a new political movement after several of his hallmark proposals during that campaign were abandoned by his own party.

Radical left-winger Jean-Luc Melenchon, also eliminated in the presidential contest, criticised his erstwhile allies in the Communist Party and vowed to campaign without them for seats in the 577-seat National Assembly.

The two-stage legislative elections on June 11 and 18 will decide whether a new party created by 39-year-old Macron, who is due formally to take power on Sunday, will win enough seats to allow him to govern effectively for the next five years.

Macron’s year-old Republic on the Move party does not have any seats in the current parliament but it hopes in June to secure a majority that will allow him to push through economic reforms for reviving an economy beset by high unemployment and sluggish growth.

The Socialists, whose term in government comes to an end in tandem with the departure of President Francois Hollande, have traditionally disputed power with the centre-right for the past half century.

The main right-wing party, The Republicans, is also striving to come to terms with the new political landscape and will be working to try to cling on to its dominant role too.

Francois Baroin, head of the Republicans’ parliamentary election team, said on Tuesday they would abandon key proposals that their unsuccessful presidential candidate, Francois Fillon, stood for.

The party was due later to work further on what Baroin said would be a revamped programme for the National Assembly election.

On both sides of the traditional divide, the signs so far are that the large parties which have long dominated are struggling to maintain leverage over Macron via the lower house of parliament without losing too many of their troops through defections to his camp.

Showing who is in charge right now, his Republic on the Move party made clear on Wednesday that even top-rank politicians from established parties were not guaranteed a slot on its list of parliamentary contenders.

— Reuters