French residents living in the Southeast can go to the polls in the second round of parliamentary elections for their representatives in the National Assembly on Saturday, June 17. This time they won’t have to choose from 18 candidates as they did on June 3. They will, however, perhaps face a dilemma.
Instead of the two top vote getters on June 3 — namely Roland Lescure, the Canadian who is the candidate of the En Marche party supporting French President Emmanuel Macron, and Frederic Lefebvre, the current representative to the National Assembly on behalf of North America and Canada, formerly a member of the Republicains.
Formerly — that’s right, formerly — Mr. Lefebvre, a former minister in the Republicains government of Nicolas Sarkozy and who for the past four years has served in the National Assembly, announced last week that he voted in the presidential election for Mr. Macron and supported the president’s agenda in the Assembly, thereby terminating his allegiance to the Republicains.
In an official statement, he says that he is leaving the Republicains after being a member for 17 years to support Mr. Macron “with the same enthusiasm that France’s youth who have joined Mr. Macron’s En Marche party.”
Referring to his supporters, he adds that “We share with Emmanuel Macron the only certainty of reform, of stopping the impediments to progress, of ostracizing the extremes, is to bring together reasonable candidates from the right and the left.”
“Never have I felt so in step with our citizens.”
Mr. Lescure received more than 50 percent of the votes cast in the first parliamentary round on June 3. But Mr. Lefebvre, who received the second largest number of votes, is in a runoff because less than 25 percent of the registered voters came to the polls. To see the results for the polling in Atlanta, Greenville, S.C.; Nashville, Tenn. and Raleigh, N.C., click here.
This past weekend projections showed Mr. Macron’s party that is barely a year old and their allies winning more than 32 percent of the votes. It is estimated that they could win more than 450 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly in a runoff vote Sunday.
If the projections are correct, Mr. Macron’s party and its allies would have total control over parliament to carry out reforms starting with an overhaul of hiring and firing procedures by French companies.
Mr. Macron’s anticipated landslide victory is marred only by the poor polling numbers showing that only 48.7 per cent of 47 million registered voters cast their ballots.
As for Mr. Lefebvre, Dominique LeMoine, his law partner in Atlanta, told Global Atlanta that he expects his friend and law partner to concentrate on building up their law practice.
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