France’s far-right Front National (FN) has been beaten into third place in the second round of regional elections, exit polls indicate.
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The ruling Socialist party of President Francois Holland secured the majority of votes in five regions of the country while the National Front party lost in all regions. The big winners Sunday appeared to be the conservative Republican party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy.
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. The fact that national voter turn-out, at 59%, was much higher than in the first round, suggests that lots of anti-FN voters did indeed make an effort to go to votechose the latter.
For weeks, the Front and its supporters have boasted that it is France’s leading party, and that the country had become a three-party system: left, right, and – in the Front’s own terminology – nationalist.
Earlier on Sunday, French media reported that ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party The Republicans won the elections in seven regions out of 13. He called on socialists to vote for LR candidates in the three regions where the FN looked likely to win, and where LR was ahead of the PS in the first round.
If confirmed, the results would be a huge disappointment for Le Pen, who had hoped to use victories as a springboard for presidential and general elections in 2017.
Some 23 million voters headed to the polls for the second round Sunday – 7 percent more than the first round, when the National Front led in six of France’s 13 regions.
No doubt the British and global newspapers will rejoice in the morning: “Front National trounced” etc etc – in fact the BBC is predictably already at it.
Sarkozy, weakened by his party’s poor showing in the first round, said the National Front’s high score should be a warning to all mainstream politicians.
Ipsos, Ifop and TNS-Sofres-One Point projected that Le Pen won around 42 per cent compared with Bertrand’s 57 per cent. Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, was projected to win about 45 per cent in the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region, compared with about 55 per cent for Conservative Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi. “The results are very good because we doubled our vote so that’s a good thing and we have ejected the Socialists, so that’s very good news”, said one supporter. Her party shook France a week ago by topping voting nationally in the first round.
She hailed the “total eradication” of Socialist Party representation in the southeast and the northern regions that the tactical vote produced, and condemned the concerted campaigns against her as “defamation decided in gilded palaces”.
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.
Le Pen praised those who had voted for her, saying they had resisted “intimidation, infantilization and manipulation”. Le Pen is in the race for the presidency of the French northern region.
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But he too hinted at the need to take the National Front vote share seriously.
