French legislative election, 1997
The parliamentary election in France in 1997 took place on 25 May and 1 June 1997. The occasion was an early resolution of the 11th French National Assembly by President Jacques Chirac. The election resulted in a victory of the left parties of the gauche plurielle under Lionel Jospin.
Background
The Civil Rights of the Union pour la France, driven mainly by RPR and UDF had the parliamentary elections 1993 - won with an overwhelming majority of seats - even under President François Mitterrand. Overall, the Union had nearly 80 percent of the seats in the National Assembly.
After his election as President Jacques Chirac had not dissolved the Parliament, as did its predecessor. He had, however, a new Prime Minister, Alain Juppe appointed. Meanwhile, government lost dramatically in popularity, so that Juppé was described by media as a " least favorite Prime Minister of all time".
On 21 April 1997, Jacques Chirac announced the premature dissolution of the National Assembly. He justified this by saying that his government would need a new legitimacy for major reform projects. The media has been suggested that Chirac wanted to avoid the premature dissolution of the National Assembly that the election would coincide with the decision on euro membership of France, as would have been the case with the regular election date in March 1998. He was afraid that the necessary measures to fulfill the convergence criteria of the already low anyway popularity of his government would continue to hurt and could score the left and the extreme right with a campaign against the euro. Election polls said at the time the resolution requires a victory for civil rights.
On the left, succeeded Lionel Jospin, the first secretary of the Socialist Party, with other parties of the Left, especially the Communists and the Greens, an electoral alliance to complete the gauche plurielle ( " diverse Left "). On the right, however, the " Union pour la France " was broken after the presidential election in 1995.
Results
In the first ballot the Gauche plurielle reached about 44 percent of the votes, the Socialists with 23.5 per cent were strongest. The civil rights came to just over 36 percent. A problem for them was the strong showing of the National Front, which reached nearly 15 percent, and was represented in a number of run-off election with a candidate of their own. In these constituencies, it usually came at Dreier - off elections, in which the joint candidate of the gauche plurielle against the two candidates of the rights in the advantage was.
In the second ballot the gauche plurielle able to increase its share of the vote to 48 percent, the civil rights to 46.1 percent. However, by a majority vote, the Left won a clear majority of 320 of the 577 seats, with Socialists, Communists and Greens alone already possessed an absolute majority and were not dependent on the support of smaller parties of the left.
In the wake of the election of Socialist Lionel Jospin was asked to form a government, which led to the third cohabitation. The Jospin government held office until the French 2002 presidential election, which took place shortly before the 2002 parliamentary elections.