French far-right Front National (FN) President and candidate in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region for the second round of the regional elections, Marine Le Pen waves during a campaign rally on December 10, 2015 in Paris, as the party’s candidate in the Ile-de-France region Wallerand de Saint-Just (L) applauds.
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“Voters should not be treated like children, nor be terrorised”, a smiling Marine Le Pen told reporters after casting her vote in Henin-Beaumont.
Some in the party were dismayed by Mr Sarkozy’s decision not to employ the same tactics as the Socialists.
Tonight does indeed represent a significant blow to Marine Le Pen’s presidential aspirations.
Although the party failed to sustain the gains Sunday, it captured more than 27 percent of the national vote and will be the only opposition party to hold seats on a number of regional councils.
Despite being shut out yet again by France’s two main parties, Le Pen was defiant in her speech.
A second lesson from these results is that the governing Socialists look stronger in France than they have for a long time.
The higher turnout may have played a role in keeping the far right National Front from winning any regional vote despite coming out on top in six of them in the first round. “The danger of the far-right has not been removed”.
“With a 50 percent participation rate, Le Pen took 6 million votes, so we can roughly estimate that she could take up to 9 million votes at a presidential election, or 23 percent”, said Yves-Marie Cann, director of political studies at pollsters Elabe.
The Socialists urged their supporters to back Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservatives in those two constituencies to keep the FN out of power, and a series of opinion polls have shown that voters might well be heeding that call.
That gamble apparently paid off. “Here we stopped the progression of the National Front”.
Regional elections, with their low turnout and proportional system, favor insurgent parties like the National Front, as shown by its strong showing in the first round a week ago.
The National Front has racked up political victories in local elections in recent years, but winning control of any region would have been an unprecedented boost for the party ahead of presidential elections in 18 months. He stated, that, although his party will “refuse all compromise with the extremes, we must now take the time to debate the fundamentals of great questions that are anguishing the French”.
Her 26-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen was also clearly defeated by the right-wing grouping in the southern region that includes the glitzy resorts of the Cote d’Azur, despite dominating the first round last week.
In the eastern region, where the Socialists did not withdraw but where the FN also did well in the first round, the center-right won 48.4 percent against the FN’s 36.4 percent, according to a separate poll by TNS-Sofres-One Point.
Early estimates showed Marine Le Pen finishing on around 42 percent compared to about 57 percent for her right-wing rival Xavier Bertrand in the economically depressed northern region.
Early results suggest the party has been beaten into third place, despite leading in six of 13 regions in the first round of votes a week ago. Final official results are expected later on Monday.
The rise of attacks by Islamist terrorists, combined with the migrant crisis that has seen hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim immigrants cross into Europe, has fed support for the National Front’s anti-immigration policies.
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After the poll results for the elections were revealed, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that the danger of FN is still sustained though it did not win the elections.
