Projections show La Republique en Marche (Republic on the Move) and its MoDem ally set to win up to 445 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly.

The final outcome will be decided at a run-off next Sunday.

Mr Macron’s party was established just over a year ago and many candidates have little or no political experience.

With all the ballots counted, Mr Macron’s LREM and MoDem had won 32.3% of the vote.

The centre-right Republicans had just under 16%, while the Socialists, previously France’s ruling party, had won just 7.4%.

The far-right National Front (FN) had 13.2%, followed by the far-left France Unbowed on just over 11%.

But turnout was sharply down, at 48.7% compared with 57.2% in the first round in 2012, which analysts say reflected a sense of resignation among Mr Macron’s opponents.

French political map redrawn – Hugh Schofield, BBC News, Paris

There can be no disputing the extraordinary achievement of Emmanuel Macron. Yes, he has certainly had luck but he has also foreseen with uncanny clarity how – with the right moves at the right places at the right times – the map of French politics was waiting to be redrawn.

If the projections from the first round are sustained, then the change that is about to happen to the National Assembly is as big as the one that occurred in 1958 when Charles de Gaulle brought in the Fifth Republic.

Scores, hundreds, of new MPs will be arriving who have never set foot in a debating chamber of any kind, let alone the country’s legislature.

It is all liable to bring a rush of blood to the head, and the greatest danger right now for Macron and En Marche is hubris. The victory is no doubt spectacular but so far it has all been electoral.

Phase two of the Macron master plan – actual reform – is the next challenge. And bigger.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel congratulated Mr Macron on the “great success” of his party. It was a “vote for reforms”, tweeted (in German) her spokesman, Steffen Seibert.

Mr Macron, 39, defeated FN leader Marine Le Pen in the presidential run-off last month.

He needs a majority to push through the changes that he promised in his campaign.

He has already left an impression around the world, in particular for standing up to US leader Donald Trump on issues like climate change.

After the projections were announced, a government spokesman said voters had shown they wanted to move fast on major reforms.

But François Baroin, head of the Republicans, said the low turnout testified to the “deep divisions in French society” and was “extremely worrying”.

Marine Le Pen blamed her party’s poor performance on the low turnout, saying France’s electoral system, which favours larger parties, needed to be reformed.

“This catastrophic abstention rate should raise the question of the voting rules which keep millions of our compatriots away from the polling stations,” she said.

Socialist leader Jean-Christophe Cambadélis lost his seat in the first round.

He warned voters against giving LREM an absolute majority next Sunday, saying it would result in “virtually no real opposition and we will have a National Assembly without any real counterbalance, without a democratic debate and not worthy of that name”.

Those standing for LREM come from all walks of life and include students, retired citizens and a bullfighter.

To win in the first round, candidates had to gain at least 50% of the vote.

The election took place amid heightened security after a series of devastating terror attacks in recent years.

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Source: BBC

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Pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron made the comments as he and his far-right rival Marine Le Pen held rallies in the last week of campaigning.

French voters go to the polls on Sunday to decide between the two.

At a rally in a suburb of Paris, Ms Le Pen has meanwhile accused Mr Macron of being merely more of the same.

Ms Le Pen has capitalised on anti-EU feeling, and has promised a referendum on France’s membership.

France is braced for mass May Day rallies. Five big unions have urged their members not to vote for Le Pen, though three have stopped short of backing Macron.

“I’m a pro-European, I defended constantly during this election the European idea and European policies because I believe it’s extremely important for French people and for the place of our country in globalisation,” Mr Macron, leader of the recently created En Marche! movement, told the BBC.

“But at the same time we have to face the situation, to listen to our people, and to listen to the fact that they are extremely angry today, impatient and the dysfunction of the EU is no more sustainable.

“So I do consider that my mandate, the day after, will be at the same time to reform in depth the European Union and our European project.”

Mr Macron added that if he were to allow the EU to continue to function as it was would be a “betrayal”.

“And I don’t want to do so,” he said. “Because the day after, we will have a Frexit or we will have [Ms Le Pen’s] National Front (FN) again.”

The 39-year-old is leading in the polls by 20 percentage points, and will try to win over more voters when he speaks in north-east Paris later.

Ms Le Pen, 48, has been holding her rally in the working-class Paris suburb of Villepinte.

Referring to Mr Macron’s period as a minister in President Hollande’s government, she accused him of being a “candidate of continuity… littered with the corpses of jobs transferred off-shore, the ruins of bust businesses, and the gaping holes of deficit and debt”.

Ms Le Pen has won support in rural and former industrial areas by promising to retake control of France’s borders from the EU and slash immigration.

Earlier, her estranged father – FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen – attended a march from the statue of Joan of Arc, a long-time FN icon.

The 88-year-old was kicked out of the FN by his daughter two years ago for repeatedly calling the Holocaust a “detail of history” – remarks which were preventing Marine Le Pen from putting distance between the party and its past links with anti-Semitism.

Sunday was France’s national day of remembrance for the French Jews who were deported to Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Mr Macron visited Paris’s Holocaust memorial to pay his respects, while Ms Le Pen laid a wreath at the World War Two monument in Marseille.

But the war remains a difficult area for Ms Le Pen. She suggested earlier this month France was not responsible for a 1942 wartime round-up of 13,000 Jews, who were sent from France to Nazi death camps.

Meanwhile, Jean-François Jalkh – the man she named as interim president of the FN while she campaigned – was forced to step down on Tuesday amid claims he had questioned the reality of Nazi gas chambers, which is a crime under French law. He denies wrongdoing.

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Source: BBC

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