Macron’s Party Heading for Parlimentary Poll Victory

French President Emmanuel Macron’s La Republique En Marche party is set to win a large majority in the French Parliament at this month’s legislative elections, according to a new poll by Ipsos/Sopra Steria published on Tuesday.

Macron’s upstart La Republique en Marche! (The Republic on the Move!) movement will secure between 350 and 400 seats in France’s 577-seat National Assembly, perhaps giving the young, centrist president the largest parliamentary majority since former president Jacques Chirac in 2002, the directors of polling for Ifop, Kantar Public and OpinionWay institutes agreed, Politico reported.

“If En Marche! gets around 350 seats, it will be a majority at least as good as the one [former president Nicolas] Sarkozy enjoyed in 2007. But there are projections that go as high as 400 seats, which means an extremely large majority that has rarely been seen since the end of World War II,” Bruno Jeanbart, a director at OpinionWay, told members of the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris.

Macron, 39, a former economy minister who had never won an election before last month, shocked France and the world by handily winning the May 7 presidential runoff. His momentum is expected to carry over into France’s two-round legislative elections on June 11 and 18, and wreak further havoc on established political parties.

“En Marche! is a virtual fragmentation bomb, meaning it explodes in one place first–and that was the presidential election–and now it will continue exploding in the legislative elections,” Kantar’s Edouard Lecerf said. “It will continue inflicting damage on political life as we know it, creating shockwaves at the local level. It will reorder the way we see and interpret the political landscape.”

The mainstream conservative Les Republicains party is expected to arrive in second place in the parliamentary vote, with between 110 and 130 seats, the opinion experts believed.