Final French candidates registered ahead of campaign sprint

The final hopefuls in France's snap legislative elections on Sunday were registering their candidacies ahead of a less than two week campaign where President Emmanuel Macron hopes to claw back ground from the far right.

Candidates have until 1600 GMT to register for the 577 seats in the lower house National Assembly ahead of the official start of campaigning from midnight for the June 30 first round. The decisive second round takes place on July 7.

The alliance led by centrist Macron, who called the snap polls some three years early after the far right trounced his party in EU Parliament elections, now has just under two weeks of campaigning to close what still appears to be a gaping gap with the far right.

The outcome of the poll remains far from clear, with many in France still baffled over why Macron called an election that could see the far-right National Rally (RN) leading the government and its leader Jordan Bardella, 28, as prime minister.

But another likely outcome is a hung parliament with no overall majority with weeks of coalition-building looming and potentially even more elections.

One of the most high-profile of the last candidates to register was Marie-Caroline Le Pen, the elder sister of the RN's three-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who will stand for the party in the central Sarthe region.

Her daughter Nolwenn Olivier is Bardella's ex-partner.

 'Young and inexperienced'  

Macron's dissolving of parliament after the French far right's victory in the EU vote has swiftly redrawn the lines of French politics.

A new left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front, has emerged and the main right-wing party's leader has announced he is prepared to back an alliance with the far right.

The new left-wing coalition faced its first crisis over the weekend after some prominent MPs from the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party found they had not been put forward to stand again.

But Adrien Quatennens, a close ally of LFI figurehead Jean-Luc Melenchon, withdrew his candidacy which had sparked anger due to a conviction for domestic violence.

A divisive figure even within the left, Melenchon told France 3 television that he was prepared to give way to some other left-wing figure to try to become prime minister.

"If you think I should not be prime minister then I won't be," he said.

On the right, the decision of Eric Ciotti, the leader of the Republicans (LR), to seek an election pact with the RN provoked fury inside the party and a move by its leadership to dismiss him, which a Paris court blocked on Friday.

Former right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper that Ciotti should have consulted the party leadership over the coalition and put it to a members' vote.

He expressed concern that the LR risked just being absorbed into the RN and also questioned the wisdom of backing Bardella as premier.

Bardella has "never been in charge of anything", said Sarkozy, asking: "Can you lead France when you are so young and inexperienced?"

 'Surprise not enough' 

 Macron is this week due to return to the domestic campaign fray from engagements abroad at the G7 summit in Italy and the Ukraine peace conference in Switzerland.

The president has been advised by comrades within his Renaissance ruling party to let the considerably more popular Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, 35, take the lead in the campaign.

But the personal stakes are huge for Macron, who risks becoming a lame duck president until his term expires in 2027, even though he has ruled out stepping down whatever the result of the polls.

Former Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, who famously in 2002 bowed out of politics after the far-right's Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine's father, kept him out of the presidential elections run-off, warned of the perils for Macron.

Jospin, who only speaks in public very rarely, said that Macron had forced France into a "hurried" campaign and was "giving the RN a chance to come to power in France".

"It's not responsible," he told Le Monde, accusing Macron of "arrogance" and witheringly adding that "surprise is not enough to be master of the game".

Sarkozy also warned that Macron was taking a risk for himself and the country, saying the move "could plunge France into chaos from which it will have the greatest difficulty in emerging".