French Socialists win absolute parliament majority

Source: Reuters

By Catherine Bremer and Daniel Flynn
PARIS | Sun Jun 17, 2012 2:36pm EDT

(Reuters) - French President Francois Hollande's Socialists won an absolute parliamentary majority on Sunday, strengthening his hand as he presses Germany to support debt-laden euro zone states hit by austerity cuts and ailing banks.

The Socialist bloc secured between 296 and 320 seats in the parliamentary election runoff, according to reliable projections from a partial vote count, comfortably more than the 289 needed for a majority in the 577-seat National Assembly.

The result means Hollande won't need to rely on the environmentalist Greens, projected to win 20 seats, or the Communist-dominated Left Front, likely to have just 10 deputies, to pass laws. The centre-left already controls the upper house of parliament, the Senate.

The far-right anti-immigration National Front achieved a breakthrough, winning its first parliamentary seats since the late-1980s. Its charismatic leader, Marine Le Pen, narrowly lost her race in a working-class northern town, but Marion Marechal Le Pen, 22, granddaughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, was elected in the southern town of Carpentras.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/17/us-france-election-idUSBRE85G03F20120617