Macron poised to secure huge parliamentary majority

New French President Emmanuel Macron is on track to consolidate his power in the National Assembly elections, which will be completed after a second round of voting Sunday. Macron's year-old En Marche! movement is expected to win as many as 470 of 577 seats in France's lower house of Parliament, an even more remarkable majority than the 400 seats the president's party was initially predicted to take.

This means heavy losses for the right-wing Republicans and the Socialists, previously the heavy hitters of French politics. "What is extraordinary is the speed with which it's happened," Sudhir Hazareesingh, an Oxford University professor of French politics, told The Washington Post. "What's also extraordinary is that both traditional parties are being swept away."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.