A fiery orator but also a pragmatist, Marine Le Pen has steered France’s far-right National Front (FN) from pariah status into the mainstream.
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The once-powerful Socialist Party, which now controls all but one of France’s regions, came in a poor third place in the first round and pulled out of key races in hopes of keeping the National Front from gaining power.
Le Pen seemed unfazed by the second round results, vowing that her party’s fight for France was just beginning and that she’d be back on the ballot in the 2017 presidential elections.
She celebrated the “total eradication” of the left, who had controlled all but one of France’s regions before this vote and were projected to lose several. She said she would in the coming weeks “rally all the French, of all origins, who want to join us”.
Le Pen told her supporters that the setback wouldn’t halt “the inexorable rise, election after election”, of the National Front, Reuters reports.
Preliminary results show Socialist regions in pink, Republicans in light blue, Front National in navy, and regional parties in green.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front, was defeated easily by the centre-right Republican party candidate in the new northern-Picardy region, despite having had a big lead in the first round.
Le Pen herself lost out to the Republicans in the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, while her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen, a 26-year-old rising star in the party, also failed in her bid to take the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.
“Nothing can stop us now ‘ she announced, to cheering supporters”.
They won six of 13 regions in last weekend’s first round, benefitting from security fears in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks on November 13 which claimed the lives of 130 people.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls was prudent to sound a cautious note in his speech tonight: ‘tonight there is no relief, no triumphalism, no message of victory.
Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration National Front was the frontrunner heading into the decisive second round of…
Le Pen has repeatedly declared that she is heading toward the 2017 presidential elections with the intentions of qualifying for the second round.
Newspapers across the political spectrum reacted with shock to the National Front’s strong showing in the first round, which Le Pen said indicated that the National Front was now “the first party of France”. “The danger posed by the far right has not gone away, far from it”. But there can be no denying the Front National is radically changing French politics. But unlike the ruling socialist party (PS) and Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative “Les Républicains” (LR), the FN has no allies or reserve voters to bolster its score in the run-off.
‘For me, she is going to win, ‘ said voter Evelyne Risselin in Le Pen’s electoral home base Henin-Beaumont. She denounced “this giant campaign of insults, slander, fear” by her rivals during a bitter campaign.
Before the election, NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley spoke with disaffected French citizens who said they’d welcome a National Front victory in their region.
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“France in moments of truth has always taken refuge in its real values”, Valls said, urging his compatriots to “build together” after a particularly bitter election campaign.
