Emmanuel Macron’s Amateur Politicians Are Poised to Remake French Parliament

ST.-JACUT-DE-LA-MER, France — The unmistakable candidate stood out during a campaign stop in a traditional Breton seaside village. “Ah, it’s you!” a middle-aged woman called out excitedly as he worked potential voters at the market — as if it could be anybody else.

Hervé Berville — tall, gaunt and of African descent — survived Rwanda’s genocide, was adopted by a Breton couple and studied at the London School of Economics. Just 27, he was snapped up last month by President Emmanuel Macron’s political movement, La République en Marche, to run for a seat in Parliament from this northwestern region.

Mr. Berville is the face of a new type of citizen-candidate in France, one with no political experience, no allegiance to the traditional parties and an undefined if firmly held belief that France needs to change. Surprisingly, polls before Sunday’s first round of national voting show that a majority of French voters may agree.

Candidates like Mr. Berville are part of a wave that Mr. Macron hopes will complete the thorough transformation of France’s political landscape. The young president has so far had few missteps, from the founding of his upstart nonparty movement 14 months ago to his upset election victory last month.

A month ago, there were doubts about whether Mr. Macron could come up with enough candidates, let alone win a majority. But a widely acknowledged strong beginning by Mr. Macron — one veteran politician from the rival Socialists was quoted as saying the French were “stupefied” to discover the new president’s adroitness — has swept away the skepticism.

That showing has helped Mr. Macron recruit dozens of nonpoliticians to run for him across the country: a famous female ex-bullfighter, a renowned mathematician, a fighter pilot, a former top paramilitary police commander, a handball champion, and lots of owners of small- and medium-size businesses.

Many, exceptionally for France, are also minorities, and 50 percent are women. After the last elections, one researcher found a mere 12 members of Parliament of minority origin, barely 2 percent of the legislature — hardly representative of France’s diverse population.

“That they took me, it’s really a very strong symbol,” Mr. Berville said as he hurtled through the Breton countryside in a tiny subcompact — the official campaign car — driven by his campaign manager-friend. “It’s a symbol of renewal. The citizens are waiting. They need to be heard.”

Candidates like Mr. Berville are expected to deliver a large majority to Mr. Macron, according to pollsters. If so, they will most likely remake Parliament in an amateur mold to a degree never previously seen in the Fifth Republic.

Like Mr. Berville, over 50 percent have never held political office (only 5 percent are incumbents), and their average age is under 50. Mr. Berville is not even the youngest.

When he reached his destination, the modest outdoor market at St.-Jacut, it was an unscripted mix of awkward and engaged. The smiling Mr. Berville was recognized by everybody, was refused an ear by nobody and was distinctly more casual in his shirt sleeves than a frowning, dark-suited rival from the right-leaning Republican party, visiting the same stalls.

“People are needing renewal. They’re needing change,” said a farmer listening to Mr. Berville, Olivier Bruyant, who later gave the candidate a bunch of organic carrots.

Mr. Macron will need a big majority to push his reformist agenda, friendly to markets and France’s social protections, through the Palais Bourbon in Paris, where Parliament meets.

But even more significant: The predicted majority for Mr. Macron, 39, would put the finishing touches on the new president’s dismantling of the parties that held power in France for 50 years until he came along.

Both right and left will wind up with small fractions of Mr. Macron’s total, if the polls hold. The far-right National Front — Mr. Macron’s runoff opponent last month — is now predicted to gain a mere handful of seats, perhaps including one for its defeated leader, Marine Le Pen, in the far north.

So the traditional parties, discredited by years of low growth and corruption scandals, will have to do business with Mr. Macron in Parliament if they are not to wind up merely yelling from the aisles. But with a potential 425 seats for La République en Marche in the 577-seat Parliament, he will most likely not need them at all.

The incumbent opposing Mr. Berville in the Côtes-d’Armor department, the Socialist Viviane Le Dissez, does not even give her party’s name on the cover of campaign literature.

“We were very sensitive to choosing candidates who reflected French society,” said Jean-Paul Delevoye, the veteran politician who led Mr. Macron’s selection committee.

While he did not know the percentage of minority candidates, it was “significant,” he said.

Mr. Berville’s unlikely trajectory embodies the new president’s un-French belief in the transforming power of individual initiative. Orphaned in a Rwanda that was entering into full-fledged genocide in 1994 — his parents died before the massacre — Mr. Berville was evacuated by the French Army at the age of 4 and put up for adoption.

A modest Breton couple in a rural town — his father is an aviation mechanic, his mother a hospital functionary — adopted him and raised him with their own four children. Recently he was reunited with his surviving Rwandan family for the first time since early childhood, a subject Mr. Berville did not care to dwell on.

He excelled in school, earned a master’s degree in development economics at the London School of Economics, worked for two years as an economist in Mozambique for the French overseas development agency AFD and was a Stanford University research associate in Kenya.

He speaks fluently about developing-world economic strategies, says he has never been the subject of racial discrimination in a part of France where there are few immigrants and shrewdly recognizes the exoticism of his appeal to the voters.

“People come to me because of my background,” Mr. Berville said in an interview in the regional hub of Dinan. “They come to me because I am not the archetype of a traditional political movement. My origins elicit curiosity.”

Later, at a town hall meeting in Lanvallay, he spoke the language of the well-versed French technocrat, fluently batting away the crowd’s concerns that Mr. Macron’s mild deregulatory urge might leave France’s well-protected citizens too exposed.

“What’s missing in France is fluidity in the work-employment relationship,” Mr. Berville said.

Mr. Macron wants to open up unemployment benefits to independent workers, while loosening up the rigid French labor code to make it easier to hire and fire. His candidate in Brittany had no difficulty defending a program “liberating energies and protecting individuals,” as he put it.

“He incarnates a profound change that is happening in France,” said Jerome Wenz, 63, a retired civil servant, who listened to Mr. Berville in Lanvallay.

“It’s a change of generation, a kick in the anthill,” he said. “And he incarnates the possibility of hope in regard to Europe — the hope of taking care of the future of our planet.”