PARIS -- Candidates were racing to register for an early parliamentary election before a Sunday evening deadline for a vote that's redrawing France's political landscape. But a left-wing alliance newly formed to counter the surge of the far right lost a prospective lawmaker previously convicted for spousal assault. Adrien Quatennens announced the withdrawal of his candidacy that had opened cracks in the fledgling New Popular Front.
The uneasy coalition of parties from the far-left to the center-left is campaigning against the prospect that the two-round June 30 and July 7 election could produce France's first far-right government since the Nazi occupation. President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly, parliament's lower house, in a shock response to a humbling defeat by the far right in the European Parliament election on June 9. Quatennens had previously been a lawmaker with the hard-left France Unbowed party.
Despite being handed a suspended four-month jail term in 2022 for spousal assault, Quatennens was included among 230 people that France Unbowed first put forward as election candidates with the New Popular Front, immediately testing the alliance's unity. François Ruffin, another outgoing left-wing lawmaker who is standing again, alleged that Quatennens was selected over other prospective candidates because of his loyalty to France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Melenchon. Ruffin fumed in an X post: "You prefer a man who hits his wife, perpetrator of domestic vi.
