KEY POINTS:
PARIS - President Nicolas Sarkozy has won a crushing parliamentary majority after utterly dominating the first round of the French legislative elections yesterday.
The new President's centre-right party and its allies were forecast to win well over 400 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly in the second round of voting next Sunday.
Despite a poor turn-out of just over 60 per cent - reflecting the fatigue of the electorate after the April-May presidential election - Sarkozy will claim an overpowering mandate to pursue his fiscal, economic and social reforms.
Computer projections suggested that his centre-right UMP and its centrist allies could take between 405 and 445 seats next week.
The 577 seats in the National Assembly are allocated over two rounds. Any candidate who achieves 12.5 per cent of the registered electorate in the first round can run again in the second.
Sarkozy's aim had been not just to defeat the left and centre, but to "crush all hope" that they could put together a coherent opposition.
The main Opposition party, the Socialists, looked capable of achieving a relatively respectable result next week with around 120 seats, compared to 149 at present. The new centrist party of Francois Bayrou, the Mouvement Democrate, looked likely to take only between one and four seats.
The Economics Minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, said the result showed that the French people "understood and approved" Sarkozy's plans to "open up" and "rejuvenate" French society.
The results imply a radical re-drawing of the electoral map. The new National Assembly will be dominated by the centre-right and centre-left and will have fewer political groups than any Parliament in the last century.
The French Communist Party's seats are likely to fall from 21 to only between 6 and 12. The far right National Front will once again have no seats but its share of the vote collapsed from 11 per cent to only 4.6 per cent.
The scale of Sarkozy's victory reflected the large fund of goodwill built up by the President in his first three weeks in office. He has carefully reinforced his image as an energetic man of action and has gone out of his way to create an impression of openness and readiness to break down the normal party political boundaries.
- INDEPENDENT
