National Front leader Marine Le Pen, whom some consider Europe’s Donald Trump, tailored her message to disaffected voters who feel stuck in the mire of their nation’s listless economy.
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The anti-immigration, anti-EU, FN topped the vote in six of 13 regions in last weekend’s first round, with French voters responding positively to the party’s rejection of mainstream politics. The best example of this is when the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, qualified for the runoff in the 2002 presidential elections.
Philippot said that “we gained several hundred thousand votes” despite the loss in Sunday’s final round of voting in regional elections.
But it typically struggles within the second spherical of elections as mainstream voters gang as much as maintain it from energy it misplaced 535 of 538 second-spherical duels with the Republicans in native elections this yr. The Socialist candidate refused to pull out in a third region, in the east, where the National Front’s No. 2, Florian Philippot, scored well. Winning control of a region or two would have given FN the legitimacy it craves. Just one week later, Le Pen accused the French political system of leading a campaign of intimidation and fear.
But Le Pen faces a tough second-round race against conservative former Labor Minister Xavier Bertrand in the northern region of Nord-Pas de Calais-Picardie, and her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen faces a similar challenge in the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur against conservative Nice Mayor Claude Estrosi.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned that the far right remains a “danger” despite the defeat, and urged his country to rally together against extremism.
In the Fort Nieulay section of Calais, where 15-story housing blocks jostle with 19th-century brick warehouses, many voters said they were fed up with a Parisian political class that, they contended, rarely ventures far from the gilded halls of power.
Sarkozy said his party should take heed, however, of the high support for the anti-immigration National Front.
But instead she was left admitting they would now remain a “constructive opposition” – blaming the “dishonest Socialist Party” for tactical voting keeping her out on power.
Sarkozy’s The Republicans and center-right allies took 57.5 percent of the vote in the northern region, where Le Pen was standing, against her 42.5 percent, the Ifop Fiducial poll for iTELE, Paris Match and Sud Radio showed.
The FN technically became the most popular party in France last week, winning 28 per cent of the nationwide vote. Marine Le Pen pointed this out in her concession speech tonight, saying that she had achieved the “total eradication” of the left.
But with the November 13 attacks in Paris, Marine was able to turn attention away from the family soap opera and declare that the Western world had “no choice but to win the war” against the attackers from the Islamic State group.
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The FN argues that the political manoeuvring by the main two political parties shows they are two sides of the same coin and the far-right offers the only real political alternative.
