With 52.49 percent of voters choosing to stay away on Sunday, France recorded its highest-ever abstention rate in the first round of the legislative elections, surpassing the 2017 record by a full point. Voter turnout will remain a major issue for next Sunday’s run-off, as candidates cajole voters head to the polls for the fourth time in two months following April’s two-round presidential election.
One key challenge for Emmanuel Macron’s centre-right Ensemble (“Together”) alliance and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s pan-leftist NUPES coalition – the two factions that topped first-round voting on Sunday, with just over 25 percent each – will be to get voters to spend yet another spring day at the ballot box.
“We have a system wherein the presidential election has taken up so much space that voters consider all bets are off once the president is elected,” said political scientist Martial Foucault, who heads Sciences Po’s CEVIPOF research centre. The country’s legislative elections tend to pale in comparison to the earlier, flashier presidential vote. Less focussed on individual personalities, they are seen as less accessible, with 577 individual races waged for as many lower-house seats. Voters have measurably lost interest in the parliamentary polls over the past 30 years. The National Assembly itself has, in parallel, often seen its role overshadowed by the reigning executive.
01:33
Both those sentiments have been bolstered since 2002, when the French electoral calendar was rejigged to set legislative elections just weeks after the presidential run-off. “The sequence of four elections, the two presidential rounds and now the legislative elections, has flattened turnout,” said Foucault.
High abstention rates like the ones France is seeing raise concerns about democracy, worries the specialist, who calls the parliamentary polls “fundamental” because they “allow the election of the representatives who make law”.
