Macron’s Victory Explodes France’s Political Landscape
If Mr. Macron does not win a majority, he will be forced to work with shifting majorities from bill to bill, or to form coalitions with other parties,
and coalitions "are not really in the French tradition," said Fabienne Keller, a senator from the mainstream party on the right, the Republicans.
The team’s presentation was not exactly smooth — the list first distributed to journalists had several mistakes —
and almost immediately Mr. Macron’s leading centrist ally, François Bayrou, said he was unhappy with the number of places accorded to members of his party.
On the far right, the party of Mr. Macron’s vanquished opponent, the National Front of Marine Le Pen, is weighing a name change
and yet another revamping, with numerous calls within the party to do away with its anti-euro platform.
"But they are in the middle of creating something new." The meltdown of the party system has suddenly thrust France — one of the European Union’s core countries,
and long one of its most static and resistant to change — into the same political caldron as countries like Britain, Italy, Greece and Spain.
The Republicans have worked overtime to ensure that none of their legislative candidates defect to Mr. Macron and have trumpeted
that none were on En Marche’s recently released candidate list (although the list did include a handful of lower-ranking party members or allies).
For Mr. Macron, the legislative elections are in many ways the third round of the presidential race — they are even called
that by some in the French news media — because they will determine his real strength to push through his controversial agenda to make the French economy less rigid.
