Macron’s Victory Explodes France’s Political Landscape<br />If Mr. Macron does not win a majority, he will be forced to work with shifting majorities from bill to bill, or to form coalitions with other parties,<br />and coalitions "are not really in the French tradition," said Fabienne Keller, a senator from the mainstream party on the right, the Republicans.<br />The team’s presentation was not exactly smooth — the list first distributed to journalists had several mistakes —<br />and almost immediately Mr. Macron’s leading centrist ally, François Bayrou, said he was unhappy with the number of places accorded to members of his party.<br />On the far right, the party of Mr. Macron’s vanquished opponent, the National Front of Marine Le Pen, is weighing a name change<br />and yet another revamping, with numerous calls within the party to do away with its anti-euro platform.<br />"But they are in the middle of creating something new." The meltdown of the party system has suddenly thrust France — one of the European Union’s core countries,<br />and long one of its most static and resistant to change — into the same political caldron as countries like Britain, Italy, Greece and Spain.<br />The Republicans have worked overtime to ensure that none of their legislative candidates defect to Mr. Macron and have trumpeted<br />that none were on En Marche’s recently released candidate list (although the list did include a handful of lower-ranking party members or allies).<br />For Mr. Macron, the legislative elections are in many ways the third round of the presidential race — they are even called<br />that by some in the French news media — because they will determine his real strength to push through his controversial agenda to make the French economy less rigid.
