Three Armenian Deputies in the French Parliament: France Has a New Parliament

• 06.20.2017, 16:58
•  Europe,  World,  Diaspora

RFI

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe resigned. This was announced in the administration of French President Emmanuel Macron, RBC reports. Later Macron asked Philippe to form a new cabinet. The new government will be announced on Wednesday, June 21.

French President Emmanuel Makron's party "En Marche!" gained a convincing victory in the parliamentary elections. As a result of the second round, the party "En Marche!"received 308 of 577 seats in the Lower House of the French parliament with its ally - the centrist party "Democratic Movement" (MoDem, 42 mandates), BBC reports.

Although this is slightly less than political analysts expected, predicting Macron's even more decisive victory, the French president nevertheless received a solid mandate in the Parliament to conduct his pro-European and business-oriented reform program. As part of his political plans, Macron also intends to considerably weaken the labor code and cut tens of thousands of jobs in the public sector. It is worth noting that since the time of Charles de Gaulle, the French President had not such powerful support in the Parliament.

The Conservative Party "Republicans" and its allies can form the largest opposition bloc - they will receive 125 to 131 seats. But this is substantially less than the 200 mandates that the French Conservatives had in the previous Parliament. The Socialists, who have been in power in France for the last five years, will receive from 41 to 49 seats - this is the worst result in the whole history of the party's existence. It is also noteworthy that for the first time the leader of the "National Front" Marine Le Pen gained a seat in the Parliament. Its ultra-right party can get 4-8 seats in the parliament.

It should be noted that in the second round, as in the first one, the turnout was very low. According to the head of the Public Opinion Research Institute "Kantar Public France" Emmanuel Riviere, the low voter turnout in the French parliamentary elections can be explained by the absence of a tense expectation of results and a limited choice, also by the fact that voters are tired of constant voting during the past few months.

In her turn Marine Le Pen said: "The extremely low turnout considerably weakens the legitimacy of the new national assembly and this quinquennium begins on a very bad basis," CNN reports. According to another politician, the extremely low turnout has an offensive political significance.

For the Armenians, this French parliamentary elections was signified by the fact that first in the history, three French-Armenians were elected to the French National Assembly at the same time. The Armenian public figure Arman Avagyan wrote this on his Facebook page. In his words, "this opens a new and big page in the history of more than half a million French-Armenian community."

Jacques Marilosyan (Paris), Daniel Casaryan (Lyon), 30-year-old Gyoma Kasbaryan (Sartre) - these are the ones, who passed to the new French parliament. Let's remind that this is not the first case when the names of the Armenians appear in the ruling circles of France. Under the presidency of Francois Mitterrand ethnic Armenian Edouard Balladur was the Prime Minister of France (March 29, 1993  -  May 10, 1995).  He ran for president during1995 French presidential elections, gaining the third place.