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How La République En Marche reached a parliamentary majority

In a single month, President Emmanuel Macron empowered hundreds of candidates to build a party from the ground up, win 350 seats in Parliament, and shift the dynamics of French politics.

Images courtesy of Emmanuel Macron and En Marche

metrics

  • 31
  • days
  • 378
  • nations built
  • 359
  • candidates elected

When Emmanuel Macron won the French Presidency with an inspiring 66.1% of the vote in May 2017, he made history in more ways than one. Not only was he the youngest candidate to ever to take this office in France; he was the only one to do so from outside of the established left and right parties that had dominated for decades—and the first to find himself tasked with building his newly formed La République En Marche (LREM) party to win legislative elections, almost immediately.

At any other point in history, this feat might have been insurmountable. What Macron and his candidates had at their disposal—in addition to the optimism, active participation, and appetite for change of the French people—were sophisticated digital tools to organize campaign efforts across the party, using NationBuilder Network as a reliable foundation. In a matter of days, they could rapidly create a consistent digital infrastructure across campaigns, allowing the party’s hundreds of candidates from diverse backgrounds, disciplines, and points on the political spectrum to each run their own way and remain visibly united under the En Marche banner.

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On May 11, our goal was to set up as many as 400 nations by May 24, equipping each nation with an opted-in supporter list, shared geographical tags, and a host of action-focused templates ready to customize, share, activate volunteers, and drum up grassroots support. By the time that goal date arrived, 378 nations were up, running, and working toward victory.

La République En Marche won 350 seats in the mid-June election, a decisive majority of the 577-member National Assembly.

[LREM] had huge goals, and they did everything they could to reach them. But by being so ambitious, they managed to actually get something very big done. Instead of saying, “we’re going to provide all that the candidates need and talk to them one by one,” they distributed everything and thought in terms of hundreds instead of dozens. It was amazing to see how effective it was.

It was critical for them to excel at promoting this infrastructure, especially because there were so many candidates and not everyone had a huge staff that would be able to handle everything internally. So, they put together a team of people who could support the installation process across their many nations, and because they had this team, they could quickly communicate with us when they noticed anything we could change or help them with. They were really well-organized, and their team structure was a part of what led them to success.

-Flore Blondel-Goupil, Enterprise Account Manager at NationBuilder

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