Macron’s party and its allies have won the biggest share of the vote in the first round – UPDATE

President Emmanuel Macron’s fledgling party is set to trounce France’s traditional main parties in a parliamentary election and secure a huge majority to push through his pro-business reforms, projections after the first round showed on Sunday.

UPDATE: With 90 percent of voters accounted for, Macron’s Republic on the Move (LREM) and Modem allies had won 31.9 percent support, Interior Ministry results showed.

The conservative party The Republicans and allied centre-right Union of Democrats and Independents held 18.9 percent, the National Front 13.8 percent and the Socialists 7.45 percent.

Pollsters project Macron’s alliance could win as many as three-quarters of the seats in the lower house after next week’s second round of voting.

That would give France’s youngest leader since Napoleon a powerful mandate to make good on campaign pledges to revive France’s fortunes by cleaning up politics and easing regulations that investors say hobble the euro zone’s second-biggest economy.

“France is back,” Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said on French TV. “Next Sunday, the National Assembly will embody the new face of our republic.”

Voter turnout was a record low for parliamentary elections in the post-war Fifth Republic at 48.6 percent, taking the shine off Macron’s margin of victory in the first round.

UPDATE: France’s far-right National Front is projected to win no more than five seats in the lower house of parliament, polls showed after the first round of voting on Sunday, failing to capitalise again on widespread frustration at mainstream parties.

It was the second setback for the anti-establishment party in barely a month after its leader Marine Le Pen reached the presidential run-off vote only to be soundly beaten by Emmanuel Macron and his bid to renew French politics from the center.

UPDATE: Macron’s Republic on the Move party (LREM) and its allies were set to win over 30 percent of the vote, the ministry said shortly after voting stations closed.

The figures did not include votes from France’s biggest cities and such early counts tend to be less precise than pollsters’ estimates, which put Macron’s party close to 33 percent.

The emergence of LREM little as a start-up movement just over a year ago has triggered a major shift in the political landscape in France. The ministry said the abstention rate on Sunday was a high 51.4 percent.

UPDATE: Emmanuel Macron’s fledgling party seized a big lead in the French parliamentary election first round on Sunday, projected results polls showed, setting the president on course for a massive majority to push through his pro-business reforms.

The results, if confirmed, are another blow to the country’s mainstream Socialist and conservative parties already reeling from Macron’s election in May, which blew apart the left-right divide that has shaped French politics for the past century.

Pollsters said well over 30 percent of those who voted had picked Macron’s party in the first round, a result which they said could deliver him as much as three quarters of lower house seats when the second round results come in next week.

The vote to elect the lower house’s 577 members comes a month after Macron, a 39-year-old former banker with little political experience, defied the odds to win the presidency of the euro zone’s second-largest economy.

If, as polls project, Macron and his fledgling party win a commanding majority in next week’s second round, it will be another blow for the mainstream parties on the right and left which failed to get a candidate into the presidential run-off.

“We want a big majority to be able to act and transform France over the next five years,” Mounir Mahjoubi, a tech entrepreneur running under Macron’s Republic On The Move (LREM) banner told Reuters as he canvassed support in his northern Paris constituency ahead of the vote.

Opinion polls forecast LREM and its centre-right MoDem allies will win at least 30 percent of votes on Sunday.

The conservative The Republicans party and its allies trail with about 20 percent, ahead of the far-right National Front on about 17 percent.

Such an outcome would transform into a landslide majority in the second round, the opinion polls show.

“I think voters are pretty mobilised behind LREM,” said Georges Garion, a 64-year-old company manager, before voting began in Paris. “We’re seeing a kind of majority cohesion, it’s democracy at work.”

Across France, however, turnout was low and three pollsters projected it would remain below 50 percent. Interior Ministry data showed 40.75 percent of registered voters had cast ballots by 1500 GMT, well below the 48.31 percent at the same time in the 2012 election.

The weak turnout will likely narrow the second-round field, because candidates need the support of 12.5 percent of registered voters to qualify.

While predicting the outcome can be tricky with 7,882 candidates vying for parliament’s seats, even LREM’s rivals have been saying they expect Macron to secure a majority.

Their strategy has been to urge voters to make sure the opposition will be big enough to have some clout in parliament. “We shouldn’t have a monopolistic party,” former prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, a Socialist, told Reuters.

MACRON OVERHAUL

The survival of the Socialist Party, which ruled France for the past five years but is forecast to get just 15 to 30 seats, is at stake, as is the unity of The Republicans. Some key figures from both parties have rallied behind Macron.

The National Front, reeling from a worse than expected score for chief Marine Le Pen in the presidential election, could miss its target to get enough lawmakers to form a parliamentary group. It is expected though to improve on the two deputies it had in the previous legislature.

In a country with unemployment hovering near 10 percent and at risk of breaking its public deficit commitments, Macron was elected president in May on pledges to overhaul labour rules to make hiring and firing easier, cut corporate tax and invest billions in areas including job training and renewable energy.

Macron also promised to clean up French politics after a string of scandals – a vow already tested by conflict of interest allegations against his former campaign chief Richard Ferrand, as well as reports that centrist ally Francois Bayrou’s MoDem party used EU cash to fund Paris staff jobs.

“I thought about voting for Macron but I didn’t,” said pensioner Jacqueline Laurent after voting in the town of Annecy, close to the Swiss border.

“With Ferrand and Bayrou we could see them falling back into the same old ways, so that was that. I changed my mind.”

Polling stations close at 1800 (1600 GMT) in smaller cities and two hours later in Paris and other big cities.

Very few lawmakers are expected to be elected directly in the first round – which requires an outright majority accounting for at least a quarter of registered voters.

With many fresh faces among the candidates, a political landscape divided among many forces from the far-left to the far-right, and abstention predicted to be at just over 50 percent, that is unlikely to happen in many constituencies.