Geoffroy van der Hasselt, AFP | Party leader Jean-Christophe Cambadélis is among several Socialist heavyweights to have crashed out in Sunday's first round.

The head of France’s former ruling Socialists admitted his party faced "unprecedented" losses after gruelling legislative elections that could see it lose more than 200 seats, starting with his own and that of presidential candidate Benoît Hamon.

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Projections after the first round of the parliamentary vote showed the former ruling party falling to a meagre 15 to 40 seats in the new National Assembly, from 277 in the outgoing legislature. A second round of voting will take place next Sunday, June 18.

If confirmed, the party's collapse would be even worse than in 1993, when it slumped to 56 seats from 278 towards the end of Socialist president François Mitterrand's second term.

Sunday’s results "marked an unprecedented retreat of the left as a whole and the PS [Socialist Party] in particular," said the party's head, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis. They underline the emphatic rejection of the outgoing Socialist government headed by ex-president François Hollande, who hit record levels of unpopularity during his troubled five-year term as head of state.

Cambadélis has himself failed to qualify for the second round in his constituency of northeastern Paris. Astonishingly, so has the party's candidate in last month's presidential election, Benoît Hamon.

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Other prominent Socialists who were dumped out in the first round include former interior minister Matthias Fekl and former culture minister Aurélie Filipetti.

Julien Dray, a senior Socialist, spoke of "a profound political crisis” within the party. “First we'll have to see what happens in the second round (…) and afterwards we will need to completely rework the Socialist identity," he said.

The party has already raised the possibility of having to sell its headquarters in central Paris as it haemorrhages donations and public subsidies, which are essential for keeping it afloat.

Projections on Sunday indicated that President Emmanuel Macron's centrist party La République en Marche (LREM) and its allies were on course for a huge majority of between 380 and 430 seats in the 577-member National Assembly.

Macron served as economy minister in the previous Socialist government, but fell out with the party's leaders over his desire to push pro-business and market-friendly reforms. The 39-year-old was briefly a Socialist Party member in his twenties, but started his own movement last April in a bid to redraw French politics around a new centrist force.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)



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