Elections in France: extreme right maintains advantage over left and ‘macronists’ in latest poll
The French far-right National Union party maintains its lead over the left-wing Popular Front and the ‘Macronist’ bloc, ahead of the first round of Sunday’s legislative elections in France, according to the latest poll , released this Thursday.
The National Union (RN, in its French acronym) has 36% of voting intentions, the same number as in Ifop’s last opinion study, while the left-wing coalition Frente Popular continues with 28.5% and the bloc of the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, remains at 21%. The conservative party The Republicans (LR, its French acronym) suffers a slight drop, half a percentage point, to 6%.
The survey, carried out for the daily newspaper ‘Le Figaro’, the television channel LCI and Sud Radio, predicts between 220 and 260 parliamentary mandates for the RN and its allies, short of the 289 needed to obtain an absolute majority in the French National Assembly.
The Popular Front will win between 180 and 210 deputies and Macron’s bloc between 75 and 110, which, if confirmed, will represent a sharp drop, compared to the 250 it obtained two years ago. The conservative LR will elect between 23 and 50 deputies, and the parliament will also have between five and nine left-wing independents.
Currently, Macron’s bloc has a relative majority of 250 deputies, the extreme right has 88, the left 149 and the LR 61. There are also 22 regionalists from different territories and seven non-registered representatives.
Around 66% of respondents stated their intention to vote in the first round (1.5 percentage points more than in the previous survey). By way of comparison, in the first round of 2022, the participation rate was just 47.51% of voters. Furthermore, 82% of those who said they are going to vote are certain of their choice, while 18% indicated that they may still change their minds.
The survey was carried out based on a sample of 2,343 people, interviewed between last Saturday and today.
