France elections: Why does the left-wing alliance want a recount?

4 days earlier than France heads to the polls for the second spherical of its legislative elections, questions have been raised concerning the official outcomes thus far.

Members of the NUPES leftist bloc of Jean-Luc Mélenchon have accused the authorities of omitting a few of their votes and mislabelling sure candidates.

The hole between Macron’s centre-right Ensemble! alliance and the left-wing group within the first spherical was simply 21,359 votes.

In line with the French Inside Ministry, Ensemble! picked up 25.8% of the vote, narrowly forward of NUPES’ 25.7%.

However members of the left-wing alliance have accused the French authorities of manipulating the outcomes.

Manuel Bompard, a senior NUPES politician, has claimed on Twitter that 265,000 left-wing alliance votes weren’t counted within the ultimate totals.

French media — together with Le Monde — have additionally positioned NUPES forward of Ensemble! with 26.1% of the vote.

Former French Inside Minister Christophe Castaner has dismissed the claims by NUPES as a “traditional conspiracy concept”.

The place does the discrepancy in numbers come from?

Bompard and different NUPES candidates have claimed that sure left-wing members haven’t been included within the official tally.

This contains Dominique Potier, Joël Arivagnet and Hervé Saulignac, in addition to different left-wing candidates in French abroad territories.

Potier, Arivagnet, and Saulignac all ran towards Macron’s Ensemble! alliance of their respective constituencies.

However whereas they had been initially registered as members of NUPES, they withdrew from the alliance earlier than Sunday’s election and ran as impartial left-wing candidates.

“I stand as a social-democrat, ecologist and European candidate,” Potier informed France3 in an interview final month.

“I’ve determined to not put on the colors of this settlement of common union and to put myself within the perspective of the development of a brand new left.”

The French Inside Ministry says it was supplied with a listing of all NUPES members earlier than the vote to make use of of their official outcomes publications. Potier, Arivagnet, and Saulignac weren’t on that authentic record and the latter two had been later added to the NUPES web site on Monday, after the vote.

Furthermore, left-wing candidates in abroad territories corresponding to Corsica and Guadeloupe weren’t included on the alliance record as a result of individualities of their native events and all ran individually.

The controversy has generated recent dialogue about the way in which France counts votes throughout its legislative elections.

Simply six days earlier than the primary spherical, the nation’s Council of State had said that NUPES votes ought to be counted as a single political occasion.

The French authorities had argued that every particular person left-wing occasion ought to run individually, however the council stated in a assertion that this may occasionally “undermine the equity of the presentation of the election outcomes”.

Unfounded allegations of voter fraud had beforehand unfold on social media following France’s presidential election in April.