French PM Urges United Front to Stop Far-Right Takeover

AFP/APP

Paris:France’s prime minister on Wednesday urged voters to form a united front to block the far right in legislative elections, warning that the anti-immigration party of Marine Le Pen was within reach of winning an absolute majority.

With four days to go until the second round in the vote, France’s political future remains up in the air as the far-right National Rally (RN) party seeks to take control of government for the first time.

The RN dominated the first round of voting, presenting the party of Le Pen with the prospect of forming a government and her protege Jordan Bardella, 28, taking the post of premier in a tense “cohabitation” with centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

But a poll by Toluna Harris Interactive published Wednesday forecast the RN winning just 190 to 220 seats in the 577-seat parliament, far less than the 289 needed for the far right to have an absolute majority and form a government on its own.

A left-wing alliance called the New Popular Front looked set to win between 159 and 183 seats, and the centrist presidential camp 110 to 135, it predicted.

The new polling forecast comes after more than 200 candidates from the left and the centre this week dropped out of three-way races in the second round of the contest, aiming to prevent the RN winning the seats.

While the formation of this so-called “Republican Front” seems to have generally been a success for the government, the key question now is whether voters will respond to the pleas to block the RN.

“There is one bloc that is able to have an absolute majority and it’s the extreme right,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told France Inter radio. 

“On Sunday evening, what’s at stake in the second round is to do everything so that the extreme right does not have an absolute majority,” he said.

“It’s not nice for many French to have to block (the RN)… by casting a vote they did not want to,” he added, but “it’s our responsibility to do this.”