Party leader Marine le Pen and her allies came out on top in half of France’s 13 newly drawn regions in the first round of voting one week ago.
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To block the National Front, the Socialists withdrew their candidates in two regions where Ms. Le Pen’s party had a strong lead and urged leftists to vote for Les Ré publicains.
There were no winners in an election that consisted of establishment parties running around at the last minute trying desperately to outwit what they warned was a racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and overwhelmingly unsafe party.
Exit polls on Sunday evening showed the center-right Republican Party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy taking more regional presidencies seats than the ruling Socialist Party of President Francois Hollande. And, with 28% and first place in the first round, the party has still pulled off its best-ever national result.
Tactical voting carries a political risk for the Socialists, though, as it plays into the far right’s claim that the two main parties are indistinguishable.
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.
“Tonight, there should be no relief, no triumphalism and no victory message: the danger of the far right has not been ruled out”, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said.
But the results 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.
For most of National Front’s supporters, there was a silver lining to the party’s defeat – there will be no Socialist representatives in the council in the northern and southern regions for the next five years.
Speaking as results came in, she said in the weeks ahead she will “rally all the French, of all origins, who want to take part with us”. Voter turnout jumped to 59 percent on Sunday compared with 50 percent in the first round on December 6.
The left had controlled most of France’s regions before Sunday’s vote.
“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.
The Socialists fear that some of their supporters might stay home rather than vote for the party of Mr Sarkozy, who is widely despised by the left.
“It’s not the left and the right anymore, its globalists and patriots”, Ms. Le Pen said.
Sarkozy said his party would “refuse all compromise with the extremists” but it must debate questions worrying the French such as unemployment and frustration with European unity – issues on which the anti-immigrant FN had campaigned. Final official results are expected later on Monday.
The failure of the National Front to gain any of the six regions where it was leading didn’t stop the anti-immigration party from looking to the 2017 presidential election – Le Pen’s ultimate goal.
“The French National Front is now really part of the French political system, which was, until recently, a bipartisan system just like in the United States”, de Vries said.
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Le Pen had been counting on winning control of some regions this time around to show that her party was fit to govern in the run-up to the next presidential election.
