FRENCH president-elect Emmanuel Macron has laid the groundwork for his transition to power, announcing a visit to Germany and a name change for his political movement.
He also appeared with President Francois Hollande at a Second World War commemoration.
Macron defeated far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s presidential run-off and must now pull together a majority of politicians in the mid-June legislative election. The task may prove tricky for a president who had never run for a political office before and for his fledgling political movement La Republique En Marche (Republic On The Move).
Macron is the first president of modern France elected as an independent.
His party, previously known as a movement called simply En Marche!, is preparing a list of candidates for next month’s parliamentary election.
Macron has promised that half of those candidates will be new to elected politics.
Many voters who had supported other candidates in the election’s first round reluctantly cast run-off ballots for Macron only to prevent Le Pen from entering the Elysee Palace.
His rivals will now be motivated to keep Macron from making further gains during the two-round parliamentary election. All 577 seats in the National Assembly are up for grabs.
Macron has said he is aiming to secure an absolute majority in the lower chamber in the elections on June 11 and 18. If he does, he would be able to pick the candidate of his choice to lead the government as prime minister. But if another party wins a majority, the new president could be pressured to choose a prime minister from that party, a situation the French call “cohabitation”.
The last time France had “cohabitation” was between 1997-2002 under President Jacques Chirac, who described it as a state of “paralysis”.
If Macron’s party performs poorly, he could also be forced to form a coalition government, a regular occurrence in many European countries but far less common in France.
In a poll, 59 per cent of Macron voters said they supported him primarily to keep Le Pen from becoming president. Le Pen says she will lead the opposition to Macron.
Macron won the presidency with 66 per cent of the votes cast for a candidate, but the election also had a high number of blank or spoiled votes and an unusually low turnout.
Yesterday was a French national holiday marking decades of peace in Western Europe, something Macron made a cornerstone of his campaign against Le Pen’s brand of nationalist populism. Macron joined Hollande in a commemoration of the formal German defeat in the Second World War.
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