With four days to go before the second round of voting, France’s political future remains up in the air as the far-right National Rally (RN) party attempts to take control of the government for the first time.
RN dominated the first round of voting, handing Le Pen hope to form a government and 28-year-old Jordan Bardella took the premiership in the tense “coexistence” with centrist President Emmanuel Macron.
But the Toluna Harris Interactive poll published on Wednesday predicted that the RN will win only 220 of the 190 seats in the 577-seat parliament, short of the 289 it needs to win an absolute majority and form an independent government.
The leftist coalition, known as the New People’s Front, is expected to win 159 to 18 seats, with 110 to 135 in the centrist presidential camp.
The new vote forecast comes after more than 200 candidates from the left and center pulled out of the three-way race this week in an attempt to prevent the RN from winning the second round of the contest.
Although the formation of the so-called “Republican Front” seems to be a success for the government in general, the main question now is whether it will respond to the request of the voters to block the RN.
“There are blogs that can have an absolute majority and that is an absolute right,” Prime Minister Jibril Attal told France Inter radio.
“On Sunday night, what is at stake in the second round is to do everything to ensure that the right does not have an absolute majority.” “For many French people, it is not good to block (RN) … by giving them a vote they don’t want,” it is our responsibility to do so.
