French Socialists win absolute parliament majority

PARIS (Reuters) - French President Francois Hollande's Socialists won an absolute parliamentary majority on Sunday, strengthening his hand as he presses Germany to support debt-laden euro zone states hit by austerity cuts and ailing banks.

The Socialist bloc secured between 296 and 321 seats in the parliamentary election runoff, according to reliable projections from a partial vote count, comfortably more than the 289 needed for a majority in the 577-seat National Assembly.

The left-wing triumph means Hollande, elected in May, won't need to rely on the environmentalist Greens, projected to win 20 seats, or the Communist-dominated Left Front, set for just 10 deputies, to pass laws. The centre-left already controls the upper house of parliament, the Senate.

Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici said the result was a vote of confidence in Hollande's government that would enable it to forge ahead with its economic and euro zone policies.

"With this majority, the government has the support and the confidence to push ahead with our plans," he said. "Europe's future is at stake in the weeks ahead."

The far-right National Front achieved a breakthrough, winning its first parliamentary seats since the late-1980s in the wake of an anti-euro presidential election campaign by its charismatic leader Marine Le Pen, which struck a chord in a nation struggling with 10 percent unemployment.

Le Pen, narrowly lost her race in a working-class northern town, but her 22-year-old niece, Marion Marechal Le Pen, granddaughter of the anti-immigrant party's founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, was elected in the southern town of Carpentras. Two other National Front-backed candidates won seats nearby.

The result gives the Socialists more power than they have ever held as Hollande pushes for new tools to stimulate growth in the sickly euro zone and a European banking union that would protect depositors and states if banks fail.

Political turmoil in Greece, where parties that support the country's international bailout were heading for a wafer-thin win on Sunday that leaves many problems unresolved, is piling pressure on Europe's leaders to act to contain the bloc's debt crisis at a summit later this month.

Sunday's victory may help Hollande secure parliamentary backing for steps towards a euro zone fiscal union that Berlin is demanding as a condition for agreeing to his push for a growth pact and reforms to improve financial stability.

"It's a much bigger majority than expected," said political analyst Mariette Sineau at the CEVIPOF institute. "It can only reinforce Hollande's position internationally rather than having a weak majority and being hostage to the Greens and Left Front."

The Socialist leader flies to Mexico on Monday for a Group of 20 summit that will be dominated by the euro zone's woes as a rift with the bloc's paymaster Germany over how to resolve the crisis has sparked a rare public squabble.

PARTY UNITY OVER EUROPE KEY

Hollande, a pro-European social democrat, has broken with a Franco-German power duopoly established under his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy and is siding with southern euro zone states, calling for more flexibility on deficit targets.

He also wants a European banking union giving the European Central Bank power to supervise cross-border banks, with a joint deposit guarantee and a resolution fund, intended to ensure that bank collapses hit shareholders before taxpayers.

With the right now severely weakened, Hollande's strong hand will be a boon as he readies a wave of legislation for the weeks ahead to raise taxes in line with his tax-and-spend program and ratify a European Union fiscal discipline pact.

As well as avoiding dependence on Eurosceptical or conservatives lawmakers, Sunday's win will leave Hollande's mainly social democratic and pro-Europe cabinet intact. All senior ministers, including Moscovici and Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, won their parliamentary races.

Ayrault said the government would throw its energy into bolstering public finances, stimulating growth and bringing down unemployment, in the euro zone as well as France. "The goal is to shift Europe towards growth and protect the euro zone from speculation. The task before us is immense," he said.

Hollande, who can count on the backing of his Greens allies in parliament, needs every lawmaker's vote he can get if a public finance audit due by end-June shows that France must slow its spending promises to meet its deficit goals.

But one key supporter, his former companion Segolene Royal, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2007, was beaten on Sunday in the western city of La Rochelle by a left-wing rebel backed by Hollande's current partner, Valerie Trierweiler.

Royal's defeat, disqualifying her from a cabinet post, could create an awkward problem for Hollande, who will need to find a face-saving role for her.

The president also needs to keep Eurosceptical Socialist lawmakers behind him if he agrees to Germany's demand for deeper political integration in the euro zone. Ayrault said earlier on Sunday that any steps towards federalism would need to ensure that national parliaments provided oversight.

Hollande is still short of the two-thirds majority he would need for constitutional changes that would be required for example to give EU institutions more power over the budget.

"Hollande's biggest political test will be to keep his party united if he is forced to adopt economic policies that are unpopular with the electorate," political analyst Antonio Barroso of Eurasia Group said in a note to clients.

(Additional reporting by Leigh Thomas, Nicholas Vinocur and Gus Trompiz in Paris and Claude Canellas in La Rochelle; Editing by Paul Taylor)

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