France Charts New Course in Elections, Macron Gains Expected

France is bracing for yet another electoral contest as voters get ready to head to the polls to select the parliament that will govern the country for the next five years.

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However, the legislative elections have been an unpopular affair in recent years, with abstention rates rising steadily since 2012.

577 seats in the lower house National Assembly will be up for grabs in the two-round legislative elections. A 289-seat minimum is required for an absolute majority, without the support of other parties.

The National Assembly will likely see a massive overhaul, as 200 outgoing candidates won't stand for re-election while 7,882 candidates face-off to secure their place in the legislative body.

Newly-elected President Emmanuel Macron is hoping that voters give his centrist La Republique en Marche LREM party the mandate needed to overhaul the economy, give employers the flexibility to fire workers with more ease and carry out privatizations that have been resisted by the country's strong workers' movement.

"We want a big majority to be able to act and transform France over the next five years," Mounir Mahjoubi, a junior minister in Macron's government, told Reuters.

The larger political parties in France will likely dominate the race, marginalizing smaller parties like the hard-right, anti-immigrant National Front and other smaller groups.

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The National Front, reeling from a weaker-than-expected score for chief Marine Le Pen in the presidential election, could miss its target to get enough lawmakers to form a parliamentary group.

His party already is far ahead of competitors like the center-right Republicans. It is expected that he may gain up to 330 votes, according to recent polls.  

Very few lawmakers are expected to be elected directly in the first round.

To achieve that, a candidate would need more than half of the votes and that must account for at least a quarter of registered voters. With many fresh faces among the candidates, a political landscape divided among many forces from the far-left to the far-right and abstention predicted to be at over 40 percent, that is unlikely to happen in many constituencies.