France’s far-right National Front (FN) pulled off a historic win on Sunday, topping the vote in the first round of regional elections, in a breakthrough that shakes up the country’s political landscape before 2017 presidential elections.
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National Front leader Marine Le Pen is expected to take the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region and her niece Marion Marechal Le Pen leads the polls in the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur.
Voters are choosing leadership for the country’s 13 newly redrawn regions in elections that start Sunday and go to a second round December 13.
Exit polls from Sunday’s vote predicted that the FN had won 30.8% of the vote, followed by Mr Sarkozy’s Republicans on 27.2% and President Francois Hollande’s Socialists with 22.7%.
Nicolas Sarkozy, eager to distance himself both from the Socialists and the National Front, ruled out such a move for his party’s candidates who came third, sparking divisions inside his own ranks, according to Le Parisien.
The far-right National Front is ahead in the first round of Sunday’s regional elections in France, held in less than a month after the terror attacks on Paris, exit polls show.
The party still a number of openly homophobic politicians who have attacked the “evil homosexual lobby” – though vice president Florian Philippot was outed previous year by Closer magazine.
The former president said that parties should “refuse the too easy temptation of I don’t know what tactical arrangement”.
“It’s a magnificent result that we will welcome with humility”.
The Socialist Party on Monday announced that it would withdraw some candidates from the race in order to consolidate the opposition to the National Front.
“We must hear and understand the profound exasperation of the French people”, he said.
The party was once simply content with attracting protest votes for the gruff ex-paratrooper Jean-Marie Le Pen, but it has radically changed strategy since his daughter Marine took over in 2011, seeking to build a base of locally elected officials to target the top levels of power. All the same, the policies of the National Front would deepen France’s situation and “create great disorder”, he said, calling on a greater turnout in the second round to beat back the National Front.
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In contrast, his Socialist party, which now runs almost all of France’s regions, has seen its electoral support shrivel as the government has failed to shrink 10 per cent joblessness or invigorate the economy.
