Hollande nears exit
 

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PARIS: French President Francois Hollande chaired his final cabinet meeting on Wednesday before handing over the reins to Emmanuel Macron, with his Socialist Party close to implosion.

Macron will be inaugurated on Sunday and the centrist’s victory over far-right leader Marine Le Pen is threatening to rapidly re-draw the French political map.

The bruising contest left the traditional parties of left and right on the sidelines, and the governing Socialist Party in particular is in tatters after the two-round election.

After former prime minister Manuel Valls shocked the party by saying it was "dead" and he wanted to be a parliamentary candidate for Macron’s year-old "Republique on Marche" (Republic on the Move) movement, a**ther leading Socialist struck out on Wednesday.

Be**it Hamon, who as the Socialist presidential candidate finished fifth in the first round of the election, said he planned to launch a new leftwing movement.

Hamon vowed to "rebuild the left" with a new "broad-based movement", while saying he intended to remain a member of the Socialist Party.

Left-winger Hamon beat centrist Valls to secure the Socialist **mination for the election after an ideological battle within the party.

But he won just 6.4 percent of the first-round presidential vote on April 23, after being overshadowed by Communist-backed leftwinger Jean-Luc Melenchon.

Hamon said his movement would be launched on July 1, after legislative elections in June that are crucial to Macron’s chances of enacting his programme.

Macron, 39, has promised to rejuvenate France’s jaded governing class by bringing more people into parliament who, like him, have never held elected ******.

The incoming president has said half of the candidates for the 577 seats up for grabs in the two-round June 11-18 elections to the National Assembly will be new to politics.

The rest will be from the centrist Modem party or rebels from the Socialists and right-wing Republicans -- and he will likely need to form a coalition to govern.

A representative of Republic On the Move said on Wednesday that Valls had "**t yet" fulfilled the criteria to be a candidate.

The candidates will be an**unced by Thursday.

The ramifications of Macron’s victory were also reverberating through Le Pen’s National Front (FN), with the an**uncement that her influential niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen is quitting politics -- for **w.

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