If there are further terrorist attacks in France, and if unemployment continues to rise, the principal beneficiary is sure to be the FN.
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Le Pen is riding high after extremist attacks and Europe’s migrant crisis, and the party came out on top in six of France’s 13 newly drawn regions in the first round last week.
It secured 28% of the vote nationally, edging former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative Les Republicains party into second place with 27%, with President Francois Hollande’s ruling Socialist party coming in third with 23%.
Despite not winning in a single region, the National Front actually increased its share of the vote in the second round, garnering 29.87% of the overall vote based on around three quarters of the votes counted by the interior ministry.
No results were available Sunday night for the race in the Paris region.
Partial results showed the center-right Republicans leading in eight regions and the Socialists in five.
In a bid to keep the National Front from gaining power, the Socialists withdrew candidates who were trailing in key regions to avoid splitting the anti-National Front vote.
“Of course, Marine Le Pen can win a presidential election”, National Front vice president Florian Philippot said Monday on RTL radio.
The atmosphere in the hall in Henin-Beaumont where National Front supporters were gathered to watch election results was grim, in stark contrast to a week earlier when Ms Le Pen won more than 40 per cent of the vote.
Sunday’s result wasa swing to the center right after leftist parties won control of every region except one in the 2010 regional elections.
“The dynamic is with us”, he said.
Sarkozy paid “homage” to the voters who turned out for Sunday’s runoff elections after skipping the first round.
It is not the first time that mainstream parties have united to block the National Front. “We must act”, Socialist Party leader Jean-Christophe Cambadelis told leftist ranks. “Frankly, I’m voting against the FN in the interests of my family”, said Issa Kouyate, a 59-year-old voter of Senegalese origin, as he went to cast his ballot in Marseille, where a high proportion of citizens are of immigrant background.
The regional election, the last one before the 2017 presidential and parliamentary ballots, was seen as a test for its main contenders, Hollande, Sarkozy and Le Pen.
“The dam has held for the time being but the FN is making consistent progress in this country and at some point, the dam is going to break”, political analyst Stephane Rozes of the CAP think tank said. “The danger of the far-right has not been removed, far from it”, Valls said. So it failed once more on Sunday to turn growing popularity into power.
“France in moments of truth has always taken refuge in its real values”, Valls was quoted as saying.
In a combative speech to supporters after polls closed, Le Pen said “nothing can stop us now”. “Here we stopped the progression of the National Front”.
A TNS-Sofres poll on Wednesday showed Le Pen, who heads the party list, would lose easily to the Republicans’ Xavier Bertrand.
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Even so, the National Front is projected to have gained many individual seats.
