It compares with the 6.42 million ballots and 17.9 percent of the vote that Le Pen obtained in the first-round of the 2012 presidential election.
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For weeks the National Front and its supporters had boasted that it was France’s leading party, and that the country had become a three-party system: left, right and – in the Front’s own terminology – nationalist.
But the Socialist Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, deliberately avoided any triumphalism and did not claim that the steady rise of the far-right party had been definitively stopped. For Parisian Michel Chaput, the National Fronts failure to take a single region was less political than emotional.I think it was more a peoples leap rather than anything else, he said.
The French reunited for a day to ensure their regions would not end up in the hands of the Front National.
“Voters should not be treated like children, nor be terrorized”, a smiling Marine Le Pen told reporters after casting her vote in Henin-Beaumont.
The leader of the anti-immigration FN, Marine Le Pen, lost out to the right-wing opposition in the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region after the ruling Socialists pulled out of the race before the second round.
In a combative speech to supporters after polls closed, Le Pen said “nothing can stop us now”.
Despite the FN failing to grab its first-ever region, Marine Le Pen will still use her party’s performance as a springboard for her bid for the 2017 presidential election.
These elections were to vote for councils and presidents of the 13 French regions, which have wide powers over local transport, education and economic development.
Just because FN failed to win control of any regions, their vote, and the increasing unpopularity of Hollande and the socialists, means that they’ll be expecting to make ground in 2017.
Three polling agencies are projecting that anti-immigrant National Front has been routed in regional election runoffs despite dominating the first-round vote.
In the south-east, the right scored 54 percent against Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal, who got 46 percent.
Front National might have been held back – for a while – but party’s rising popularity shows that its anti-EU and anti-migration message is resonating with the French voters.
Politicians on left and right sounded the alarm, saying that French ills, from joblessness to inequality and a political system that fails to undo the problems – all considered National Front electoral fodder – must be cured, and quickly.
So yes, the National Front suffered a setback on Sunday but they’re far from done for and seem poised to do better in the coming years.
In May past year, the party had unprecedented success in France’s European elections, winning 25.41% of the vote – enough for 23 seats in the European Parliament. But overall, Sarkozy’s party did less well than expected, exposing its divisions on strategy for countering Le Pen. “The far-right party, which was very well positioned after the first round last weekend (having won six out of 13 regions), ended up winning 0 regions”, notes the rates research team at Royal Bank of Scotland.
Marine Le Pen has made attempts to broaden the National Front’s appeal by dropping the anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric of her father Jean-Marie, whom she expelled from the party he founded.
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.
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“If voters had followed him – she said – our candidates in the north and the south would have lost”.
