PARIS--French President-elect Emmanuel Macron's start-up party on Thursday announced a list of 428 candidates, most of them political unknowns, to fight parliamentary elections that will determine his chances of putting his programme into action.
The list of candidates, many of them young and half of them women, represented Macron's first stab at creating a parliamentary power base with his Republic on the Move party to help him push forward with reforms once in office.
But the party has yet to pick dozens of other candidates for the 577 seats at stake in the June elections, hoping more politicians from other parties will switch sides. And a first sign of a trouble for Macron appeared when his centre-right ally Francois Bayrou signalled he wasn't happy with the list of candidates, with an aide to Macron saying Bayrou thought he wasn't getting a good enough deal.
Benjamin Griveaux, a spokesman for Macron, said he was confident this issue would be resolved on Friday. "It will be done in mutual understanding," he said.
The centrist Macron, 39, formed his own party only last year, and his election victory over the National Front's Marine Le Pen on Sunday has destroyed the dominance of the centre-left and centre-right parties which have governed France for nearly 60 years. He now needs a parliamentary majority to press on with his plans to cut state spending, boost investment and create jobs to revitalise the French economy and place it at the heart of a modernised European Union.
"We want to build a majority for change and therefore obtain for Republic on the Move an absolute majority in the National Assembly," said party secretary general Richard Ferrand, adding officials had combed through more than 19,000 applications.
The door was still open for more potential candidates to apply by next Wednesday, he said.
Macron officially takes power as president on Sunday. He is building a party structure from the wreckage of the Socialists, whose candidate pooled only 6 percent of the presidential vote in the first round, and the moderate wing of the badly bruised conservative party, The Republicans, which drew 20 percent.
The list issued by Republic on the Move on Thursday included 24 outgoing Socialist lawmakers and no conservative ones. Among the names were Gaspard Gantzer, communications adviser to outgoing President Francois Hollande, and former junior environment minister Barbara Pompili, an ex-Greens lawmaker.
