Paris: France voted a record number of women into parliament on Sunday, thanks largely to President Emmanuel Macron's decision to field a gender-balanced candidate list for his victorious Republic on the Move (LREM) party.
The election was closely watched around the world to see if France's youngest leader yet would secure a mandate to push through his pro-European Union reform agenda.
The National Assembly says new lawmakers' average age is down from 55 in the previous term to 49 now.
'It is far from a punishment, because the most strategic position in the National Assembly will be that of president of the La Republique en Marche (LREM),' party spokesman Benjamin Griveaux told broadcaster BFMTV.
"A profoundly renewed political generation takes over the reins of legislative power", wrote editorialist Alexis Brezet in the right-wing Le Figaro newspaper.
Mr Macron's confident start at home, where he has concentrated on trying to restore the lost prestige of the president, and his bold action on the worldwide stage has inspired a host of positive headlines.
Ms. Le Pen, a former Presidential contender, said that: "President Macron may have won the majority of parliamentary seats, but he ought to know that his ideas are not the majority in the country and that the French will not back a project that weakens our state".
The parliamentary boost also strengthens Macron's hand on the European stage as the EU heads into negotiations on Britain's departure from the bloc.
For example, discontents in voters were marked by a projected historic low turnout and the first-time entry into parliament by Marine Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigration far-right National Front, in the French parliamentary elections.
At the end of the afternoon, turnout stood at only 35 percent - below last week's record low.
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Radical left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon said of the stayaway: "The French people are now engaged in a sort of civic general strike".
Just as what French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has commented, that "French voters have in their vast majority preferred hope to anger, optimism to pessimism, confidence to withdrawal", the conditions for populism to grow, including economic slump, society splitting, refugee crisis and terror attack threats.
Her National Front party is predicted to secure six seats.
"We are the only force of resistance to the dilution of France, its social model and identity", Le Pen said in a televised address in her northern fiefdom of Henin-Beaumont. The Socialist Party, PS, was the biggest loser, having lost 200 of its seats.
It has been a bad night for the Socialists, which shed more than 250 seats, winning just 29.
Les Republicains ("The Republicans"), the mainstream conservative party in France, also sank to an all-time low of 137 seats, losing 92, according to early election results.
Melenchon's hard-left France Unbowed won 17 seats as it also struggled to maintain the momentum it had during the presidential election. This is an unprecedented leap forward for a new party that held no seats before the elections.
Female parliamentary representation has increased steadily in France in recent years, with the 2012 elections seeing a record 155 women - 26.9 percent - voted in, up from 18.5 percent in the 2007 elections and 12.3 percent in 2002.
The other half are a mix of centrists and moderate left- and right-wing politicians drawn from established parties including ally MoDem.
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