PARIS—President Emmanuel Macron faces a tough fight to win an absolute majority in parliament that would allow him to govern with a free hand after a strong showing by a new left-wing alliance in Sunday’s first-round election.
Initial estimates by Elabe put the left-wing veteran Jean-Luc Melenchon’s NUPES bloc neck-and-neck with Macron’s Ensemble! alliance in the first round, with 26.20 percent and 25.8 percent respectively.
Elabe projected Ensemble would go to win between 260–300 parliament seats—with the mark for an outright majority set at 289 seats—on June 19 and forecast NUPES would secure 170–220 seats, a big increase from 2017.
With rampant inflation driving up the costs of living and eroding wages, Macron has struggled to build on his reelection in April, with Melenchon casting him as a free-marketeer more intent on protecting the wealthy than hard-up families….