Majority French voters favour Macron's legislative candidates

A majority of French voters say they are satisfied with President-elect Emmanuel Macron's list of candidates for the parliamentary election scheduled for June 11 to 18, a poll revealed on Friday.

A Harris Interactive survey from RMC radio and Atlantico found that three out of four respondents appreciated the profiles of the party's contenders in the battle for legislative seats, Xinhua news agency reported.

On Wednesday, the "Republic On the Move", founded by Macron in April 2016, announced a list including 428 definite names, with 214 female candidates, said Richard Ferrand, the movement's Secretary General. Yet, 52 percent of the candidates have no previous parliamentary experience. In addition to the newcomers in politics, Macron's party wishes to lure candidates from the mainstream parties in a bid to score a large majority out of 577 seats in the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament. Centrist "Republic On the Move" party currently has no representative in the assembly. Macron won France's presidential elections on May 7 with 65 per cent of the run-off vote, defeating far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.

He will be sworn-in on Sunday at a ceremony at the Elysee Palace. Macron's victory in election puts him in place to pursue his economic agenda, from cutting taxes on companies and labor, to investing more in technology and promoting freer trade and integration in the European Union.

The aim is to get the French economy growing again at least at the levels seen before the global financial crisis erupted in 2008. Since then, growth has barely averaged 1 percent a year, with many blaming the relatively inflexible jobs market. Germany and Britain, the countries France most compares itself with, have done much better. That level of growth is too low to create jobs quickly enough to bring down the unemployment rate, which has been stubbornly above 10 percent for years, double Germany's.