Ironically, while President François Hollande’s ruling Socialists lost a string of regions going from 21 out of 22 under the old system to five out of 13 in the new, the result is far less of a drubbing than expected and is less of a collapse than in other recent elections.
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Yet, while voters may have denied the anti-immigration party the leadership of any of the country’s regions, it picked up more votes than ever before, leaving opponents scrambling for a strategy to counter it.
She took over the party from her rabble-rousing father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2011 and has worked hard to improve its image, but it remains staunchly nationalistic, and Marine Le Pen has said migration into Europe recalls the “barbarian invasions” of the fourth century.
“One can hardly speak of a direct influence the results of regional elections would have on the French foreign policy, although the rise of the National Front, unfortunately, indicates that its obscurantist, chauvinist, and anti-European ideas resonate with a certain segment of the French society”.
The two French traditional parties, the Socialists and the Republicans, did not completely lose face this Sunday as had been feared, as the far-right party failed to win any of the council positions in this regional electoral runoff.
But while it has been winning more and more votes in each election since then, its isolation in France’s politics means it can not strike the alliances it would need to win major constituencies. First estimations showed he had won by about 54.4 per cent. Already, candidates and officials are pointing to the December 6 result as the “real” barometer of the country’s mood, before the tactics of the FN’s rivals supposedly skewed the repartition of votes by helping to prop up candidates who were weak on their own. She hailed the “total eradication” of Socialist Party representation in the south-east and the northern regions that the tactical vote produced, and condemned the concerted campaigns against her as “defamation decided in gilded palaces”. “We are still progressing in spectacular fashion”.
It is not the first time that mainstream parties have united to block the National Front.
Sarkozy, leader of the Republicans party, praised the voters who turned out on Sunday but said “the warnings” of the first round must not be forgotten. “A victory by ganging up 10-on-1 is nothing more than a defeat”.
Despite its triumphant showing in round one of the election, there was no breakthrough for the Front National.
Even UKIP leader Nigel Farage has previously ruled out working with Le Pen, accusing her party of “anti-Semitism and general prejudice”. She ended up losing to the center-right in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region where she ran, despite leading in the first round of voting.
Over the weekend, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front Party did not win control of any of France’s 13 metropolitan regions in the second round of voting in local elections.
Ms. Le Pen made her presidential ambitions for 2017 clear: “This distinction will be what is fundamentally at stake in the huge political decision of the presidential elections”.
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She said: “There are some victories that shame the winners”. In that same election, her party only ended up winning two seats in the legislature and actually got almost three million fewer votes than LePen received as a Presidential candidate.
