French President-elect Emmanuel Macron’s recently renamed La République en Marche named on May 11 a list of 428 candidates to stand in the June 19 parliamentary election.
Secretary General Richard Ferrand announced the candidates in a news conference.
Macron, who formed the En Marche! movement only 13 months prior to his election, had promised that half the candidates would be drawn from civil society, half would be new to politics, and the roster would be balanced between female and male candidates.
Ferrand said the nascent political party will seek a majority in parliament.
We want to build a majority for change and therefore obtain for La République en Marche an absolute majority in the national assembly.
LRM Secretary General Richard Ferrand
LRM’s list unveiled on Thursday included 214 women and 214 men. Fifty-two percent of the candidates are political newcomers.
The candidates’ average age is 46, compared to 60 in other parties. The oldest candidate is 72, while the youngest is 24 years old. Four percent of the candidates are retired, and 1 percent are students.
The selection committee received 19,000 applications since January, an average of 34 percent from each of the country’s 577 constituencies. Jean-Paul Delvoye, who was in charge of vetting the candidates, said 71 percent of applicants were men and 29 percent were women.
Former French prime minister Manuel Valls, a socialist politician who said he wanted to join Macron’s movement, was not on the list, but LRM did not name a candidate in his constituency of Evry.
Ferrand said the remaining 149 candidates required for parliament are still being discussed.
