French President Emmanuel Macron’s decisive win in the second round of the country’s legislative election Sunday was no surprise, with polls projecting strong showings for both Macron’s La République En Marche (LREM) party and its small centrist ally, Democratic Movement (MoDem), which collectively took 350 of the National Assembly’s 577 seats.
While the results mark a transformation of France’s political landscape from one controlled by two establishment parties to one controlled by a year-old political movement, it also marks a renewal of the very faces that make up the country’s lower, but more powerful, house of parliament. Of the 354 incumbents who sought re-election, 148 retained their seats—giving way to 429 new deputies, making up 75 percent of the incoming legislature. Historically, turnover rates average closer to between 120 to 270 seats. [...]
Indeed, Macron pledged this “renewal of faces” in the months leading up to his presidential win last month, vowing to field a diverse slate of parliamentary candidates, half of whom were women and more than half of whom never previously held political office. The pledge paid off: The average age of deputies dropped from 53 to 48, with the number of deputies under the age of 30 jumping from four to 29. The number of women now stands at 38.65 percent, up from 27 percent—a change that prompted France to surge from 64th to 17th place in the world’s rankings of female parliamentary representation and sixth place in Europe, besting both Britain and Germany.
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