Paris: Campaigning ended in France's parliamentary elections Saturday with voters likely to give President Francois Hollande’s Socialists a majority as he seeks to steer the country through Europe’s debt crisis.

Opinion polls released before the end of campaigning at midnight Friday showed Hollande’s Socialists and their allies on track to take control of France’s lower house National Assembly on Sunday.

Hollande, who defeated right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy in May’s presidential election, has urged voters to give him a majority as he seeks to tackle Europe’s financial crisis and France’s rising unemployment and faltering economy.

The French vote risks being overshadowed however by elections in Greece that could determine its future in the Eurozone, amid concern over the shockwaves that a Greek euro exit would send through the global economy.

The polls showed France’s Socialists winning between 287 and 330 seats in Sunday’s run-off election — almost certainly enough to secure a majority in the 577-seat Assembly.

With polls showing the Greens, who are close allies of the Socialists and already in government, set to win up to 20 seats, Hollande is all but guaranteed to get the parliamentary backing he needs.

The Socialists and other left-wing parties came out on top in last Sunday’s first round of the vote, winning 46 per cent to 34 per cent for Sarkozy’s UMP party and its allies.

Pollsters predict the UMP and its allies will take between 210 and 263 seats in the run-off.

“Unless there is an enormous surprise, Francois Hollande should on Sunday night have a majority in the National Assembly,” the left-leaning daily Liberation wrote Saturday.

“With the National Assembly, the Senate, nearly all the regions, most of the departments and good number of the big cities, Francois Hollande and his Socialist friends will have all the levers of power in their hands,” it said.

But conservative daily Le Figaro warned this would be an “unprecedented situation for nearly 200 years” and urged voters to check the Socialists’ power by voting for the right.

The vote will also be a key test for Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant and anti-EU National Front (FN), which took 13.6 percent in the first round - far above the four percent it won in the last parliamentary election in 2007.

Le Pen, who said the result confirmed her party’s position as France’s “third political force,” is hoping the FN will be able to take a handful of seats including one for her in a rundown former mining constituency near the northern city of Lille.

Polls indicate the FN are set to win up to three seats, including for Le Pen and for Marion Marechal-Le Pen, the FN leader’s 22-year-old niece, in the southern Vaucluse area.

Incendiary tweet

After a hard-fought presidential race, the campaign for the parliamentary elections has been lacklustre, with the only major excitement generated by an incendiary tweet fired off by the country’s new unofficial first lady.

The Twitter message by Hollande’s companion Valerie Trierweiler wished good luck to Socialist dissident Olivier Falorni, who is running against Segolene Royal — the president’s ex-partner and mother of their four children — in the western town of La Rochelle.

There has long been speculation of intense rivalry between Royal and Trierweiler.

Hollande stood loyally by Royal as she battled Sarkozy for the presidency in the 2007 race, but he had reportedly been in a relationship since 2005 with Trierweiler, a twice-divorced 47-year-old mother of three.

The UMP said the tweet was an inappropriate intrusion of Hollande’s personal life into politics, but analysts said that despite widespread media coverage the scandal was unlikely to have much impact on the Socialists’ result.