Absentee voters in France scramble to make their voices heard in high-stakes legislative election
Voters who don’t expect to be able to cast ballots themselves are scrambling to make their voices heard in France’s high-stakes legislative election
PARIS — Voters who don't expect to be able to cast ballots themselves are scrambling to make their voices heard in France's high-stakes legislative election by signing up in their hundreds of thousands to hand their voting rights to loved ones and friends.
The Interior Ministry said Tuesday that it counted 410,000 such requests in the first week after President Emmanuel Macron's announcement on June 9 that he was dissolving France's National Assembly, parliament's lower house. That bombshell followed a humbling defeat by the far-right National Rally party in the European Parliament election.
The ministry said the number is 6½ times more than it registered for the same weeklong period in the last legislative election in 2022.
The rush by voters to complete paperwork that will allow other people they trust to cast ballots for them in the first stage on June 30 of the two-round election is partly because of time pressures. Macron's surprise decision and the compressed time frame between parliament's dissolution and the election caught voters off guard, with some already having made other plans.
The election — the decisive second round is July 7 — also bumps up against the start of France's annual summer vacation season, when millions head to beaches and elsewhere.
The surge in registrations by likely absentee voters also reflects the importance they are attaching to the election, which is already reshaping the French political landscape even before ballots are cast.
The prospect that the vote could produce France’s first far-right government since the Nazi occupation in World
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