Voters in France\u2019s overseas territories and living abroad started casting ballots Saturday in parliamentary runoff elections that could hand an unprecedented victory to the nationalist far right.
\nMarine Le Pen\u2019s anti-immigration party National Rally came out on top of first-round voting last Sunday, followed by a coalition of center-left, hard-left and Greens parties \u2013 and President Emmanuel Macron\u2019s centrist alliance in a distant third.
\nThe second-round voting began Saturday off the Canadian coast in the North Atlantic territory of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, and follows in French territories in the Caribbean, South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, along with French voters living abroad.
\nThe elections wrap up Sunday in mainland France. Initial polling projections are expected when the final voting stations close at 8 p.m. Paris time (1800 GMT), with early official results expected late Sunday and early Monday.
\nMacron called the snap legislative vote after the National Rally won the most votes in France in European Parliament elections last month.
\nThe party, which blames immigration for many of France\u2019s problems, has seen its support climb steadily over the past decade and is hoping to obtain an absolute majority in the second round. That would allow National Rally leader Jordan Bardella to become prime minister and form a government that would be at odds with Macron\u2019s policies on Ukraine, police powers and other issues.
\nPreelection polls suggest that the party may win the most seats in the National Assembly but fall short of an absolute majority of 289 seats. That could result in a hung parliament.
\nMacron has said he won\u2019t step down and will stay president until his term ends in 2027 but is expected to be weakened regardless of the result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Voters in France\u2019s overseas territories and living abroad started casting ballots Saturday in parliamentary runoff elections that could hand an unprecedented victory to the nationalist far right. Marine Le Pen\u2019s anti-immigration party National Rally came out on top of first-round voting last Sunday, followed by a coalition of center-left, hard-left and Greens parties \u2013 and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":27032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","category-news-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27031"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27033,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27031\/revisions\/27033"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}