About this election
The 2017 French legislative elections, held on 11 and 18 June 2017, were a landslide for the newly elected president Emmanuel Macron. His year-old movement, La République En Marche (LREM), together with its centrist ally the Mouvement Démocrate (MoDem), won an outright majority of the 577-seat National Assembly only weeks after Macron took office, completing the realignment that his presidential victory had begun and sweeping aside the parties that had governed France for sixty years.
The 577 deputies of the National Assembly are elected for five-year terms in single-member constituencies using a two-round system. A candidate winning an absolute majority of the first round (with at least a quarter of registered voters) is elected outright; otherwise, all candidates who win the votes of at least 12.5% of registered voters advance to a run-off, decided by simple plurality. Because the legislative elections follow the presidential vote by a few weeks, they have tended since 2002 to hand the new president a supportive majority — the so-called "presidential bonus".
Macron's movement, founded in 2016, fielded a slate of candidates drawn heavily from civil society, half of them women and many never previously elected. The traditional parties were in disarray: Les Républicains hoped that a strong legislative showing might force a "cohabitation", while the Socialist Party, shattered by Hollande's presidency and Hamon's first-round collapse, faced near-extinction. On the radical left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise sought to build a parliamentary bridgehead, and Marine Le Pen's Front National aimed to convert its presidential support into seats.
LREM won 308 seats and the MoDem 42, giving the presidential camp a commanding majority of 350. Les Républicains were reduced to 112 seats and their UDI allies to 18; the Socialist Party, which had held the Assembly since 2012, crashed to just 30 seats. La France Insoumise won 17, the Communists 10, and the Front National only 8 — a disappointment for Le Pen given her presidential score, a consequence of the majority system that penalises a party with few local alliances. First-round vote shares were 28.21% for LREM, 15.77% for Les Républicains, 13.20% for the Front National and 11.03% for La France Insoumise.
The defining feature of the election was record abstention: turnout was just 48.70% in the first round and 42.64% in the second, the lowest in the history of legislative elections under the Fifth Republic. Many voters, having just chosen a president, saw the legislative vote as a foregone conclusion, and the fragmentation of the old parties depressed participation further.
With a large majority, Macron appointed Édouard Philippe, a moderate from the right, as prime minister and pressed ahead with labour-code liberalisation, the abolition of the wealth tax and other reforms. The scale of the victory concentrated power in the executive, and the relative weakness of a fragmented opposition contributed to the sense, during the Gilets jaunes crisis a year later, that protest had moved from parliament to the streets.
LREM's victory was geographically near-total: the party or its MoDem ally led the first-round vote in every metropolitan region except Corsica, where regionalist and nationalist candidates dominated. The map shows a uniform wash of the presidential majority's colour, with the older partisan geographies of left and right largely erased — though Les Républicains retained strongholds in the wealthier suburbs and rural conservative areas, and the Front National's deputies were elected in its north-eastern and Mediterranean bastions.
Official results from the French Ministry of the Interior — interieur.gouv.fr. The map shows the leading political tendency (nuance) by region in the first round, built from the ministry's results-by-region files.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.