France’s far-right Front National (FN) failed to transform its first-round breakthrough in the country’s regional elections intothe second round, with results showing the party beaten into third place on 13 December.
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For Marine Le Pen and her allies, the National Front’s failure to win a single region in local elections Sunday is a bump on the road toward her real political objective: reaching the second round of a presidential battle in 2017.
The anti-immigration party’s hopes of winning control of a region for the first time in its history were dashed on Sunday as voters turned out in force and switched their support to the centre-right Republicans and the Socialists of President Francois Hollande.
The conservatives took control of seven of France’s 13 regions while the Socialist party won in five regions. The Socialists moved to the front line to block the party in two key regions where Le Pen and her popular niece were running by withdrawing their own candidates.
Le Pen was expected to win the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais but suffered an upset to the Republican candidate Xavier Bertrand, losing 58 percent to 42 percent.
“I had also warned… the authorities very clearly that there will be in these immigrants terrorists, who will infiltrate… and that’s exactly what has happened”, she said. “The danger of the far-right is still around”. In attempt to draw a clear distinction with the Socialists and head off the challenge from the far right, Sarkozy has toughened his party’s stance on immigration issues, calling for the government to restrict immigrants’ access to welfare payments and citizenship and for the EU’s rules on the free circulation of people across borders to be suspended. She maintained that although the party lost in the second round at the polls, the rise of the National Front was now unstoppable.
But Sunday showed once again that the party struggles in the deciding round as mainstream voters gang up to keep it from power as they did in 2002 when voters switched to Jacques Chirac in a presidential run-off against Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. But the FN share of the vote went down slightly from 27.73 per cent to 27.36 per cent.
Despite its loss, the National Front sent a message to the French. He said he would leave his voting slip blank, though he anxious about letting Le Pen win.
The projections also showed the National Front being defeated in another of its strongest areas, the south around Nice, where Ms. Le Pen’s 26-year-old niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, was on the ballot.
Le Pen is still likely to use the FN’s performance as a springboard for her bid for the presidency in 2017.
“Nothing can stop us”, Le Pen crowed on Sunday. Turnout rose sharply from the first round, suggesting that many voters wanted to prevent the once-pariah National Front from gaining power.
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“Marine Le Pen into the second round in 2017 is a bet worth making”, Jean-Yves Camus, a researcher at Iris, a French political research institute, said in an interview last week. “This distinction will be the grand distinction of the presidential elections”. Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls has called the National Front a “scam” that “fools the French” and a divisive party that could “lead to civil war”. The question for Le Pen, and the rest of French politics, will be whether events between now and then end up helping the National Front by playing into its anti-immigrant, nationalist rhetoric in the face of increased immigration from the Middle East and the threat of terrorism.
