President Emmanuel Macron has reportedly been told to avoid campaigning due to a lack of popularity.
It comes ahead of the second round of the parliamentary election tomorrow, Sunday, where the hard right National Rally (RN) party of Marine Le Pen performed well.
One of the outgoing MPs who pulled out from the July 7 run-off is Bruno Millienne, the outgoing Democratic Movement MP for Yvelines, just west of Paris.
The 64-year-old has claimed Macron is detrimental to the centre-left campaign.
President Macron
Reuters
Millienne said in an interview: "Yes, I told the Élysée, he is hated on the ground. And we’re paying dearly for this detestation and it’s unfair."
An unnamed minister told French news outlet Le Parisien that canvassers door-knocking ahead of the European elections last month found many voters reacted negatively to the president's face on campaign literature.
Minister of ecological transition, publicly admitted President Macron had grown tiresome for some, although stressing in an interview with TF1 that this "wear and tear" is common to "all presidents of the Fifth Republic".
French football star Kylian Mbappe slammed Marine Le Pen's election success as "catastrophic" in a damning attack.
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Marine Le Pen saw her party storm to victory in the European electionsGettyIf RN wins a majority in Sunday's run-off parliamentary vote, party leader Jordan Bardella is set to become France's youngest prime minister at the age of 28. Opinion polls show that a majority is unlikely, and he has called that a condition to accepting the premiership.
A total of 577 constituencies are being decided in the election, one for each seat in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament. Seventy-six lawmakers were elected in the first round last Sunday, including 39 representing the RN and its allies, leaving 501 seats up for grabs in the run-off.
This Sunday's voting ends at 6pm local time in towns and small cities and 8pm in big cities. At 8pm, pollsters will issue initial nationwide projections based on early partial results from polling stations that closed earlier in the day. These are usually reliable.
Vote counting is usually fast. However, if the result is tight, for example the RN is within a few seats of an absolute majority, the final result may not be known until the early hours of Monday.
RN leader Jordan Bardella would be France's youngest ever Prime Minister if his party win a majority in tomorrow's second round
Reuters
President Macron has ruled out resiging, but it might become more appealing to him if policy paralysis prevails. Neither parliament nor the government can force a president to resign.
However PM Gabriel Attal, would resign immediately if RN got the majority of 289 seats to secure an absolute majority and be able to implement their anti-immigration, Eurosceptic agenda.
Macron called a snap parliamentary elections in the wake of the crushing victory by RN at the European elections in early June, a political gamble criticised by many on the left as it risks handing a huge majority to the hard -right.
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