PARIS (AP) — Voters who don’t expect to cast their own ballots are doing their best to make their voices heard in France’s high-stakes parliamentary elections by signing up by the hundreds of thousands to exercise their right to vote. to pass on their loved ones and friends. .
The Interior Ministry said on Tuesday it had counted 410,000 such requests in the first week of the presidency Emmanuel Macron‘s announcement on June 9 that he would dissolve the French National Assembly, the lower house of parliament. That bombshell followed a humbling defeat of the far-right National Rally party in the European Parliament elections.
The ministry said this number is 6.5 times more than during the same one-week period in the last parliamentary elections in 2022.
Voters’ rush to fill out paperwork that will allow other people they trust to vote in the first phase on June 30 of two-round elections is partly due to time pressure. Macron’s surprising decision and the short time between the dissolution of parliament and the elections surprised voters, while some had already made other plans.
The elections – the decisive runoff is on July 7 – also come against the start of France’s annual holiday season, when millions of people flock to beaches and elsewhere.
The increase in registrations by likely absent voters also reflects the importance they attach to the elections, which are reshaping the French political landscape even before the vote has taken place.
The prospect that the vote could produce France’s first far-right government since the Nazi occupation in World War II had a shocking effect on the National Rally’s opponents on the left of French politics. Within days of Macron’s announcement, previously divided left-wing parties put aside their differences to form a coalition to counter the rise of the far right.
With frenzied campaigns underway, voters are already preparing to make their choice between the two opposing camps – or Macron’s centrist bloc in the middle.
Rémi Lefebvre, a professor of political science at the University of Lille, told broadcaster France Info that voters who arrange for others to vote for them tend to be politically engaged and well informed. That hundreds of thousands have done so suggests that they view the election as “absolutely decisive for their personal agenda and in political life,” he said.
The stakes are “very high,” Lefebvre added, “because of the prospect of a victory by the far right, which drives voters to vote.”
Jordan Bardella, the National Rally president who hopes to become prime minister of France, appealed Tuesday to voters to give his party a clear majority.
“There is a historic opportunity to turn the tide of history, to change policy in our country and change course. But to do that, I need an absolute majority,” he said in a television interview with CNews.
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Catherine Gaschka contributed to this report.
