However, Ms. Le Pen will gain some advantage from the regional elections as she prepares to run for president of France in 2017.
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“Voters should not be treated like children, nor be terrorised”, a smiling Marine Le Pen told reporters after casting her vote in Henin-Beaumont.
Philippot said that “we gained several hundred thousand votes” despite the loss in Sunday’s final round of voting in regional elections. “It is a message we need to listen to”, he said.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed pride in his conservative party’s electoral comeback in regional elections.
It is Mr Sarkozy who appears to have had the best night and he paid “homage” to the voters who helped record an increased turnout of 58%.
The higher turnout may have played a role in keeping the far right National Front from winning any regional vote despite coming out on top in six of them in the first round.
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.
After the poll results for the elections were revealed, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that the danger of FN is still sustained though it did not win the elections.
French far-right party leader Marine Le Pen, right, campaigns at the Lille worldwide market in L … But projections by France’s major polling firms suggested that failed to translate into any second-round victories. So it failed once more on Sunday to turn growing popularity into power.
France’s National Front party leader Marine Le Pen (centre) attends a news conference with United Kingdom Independence Party former member Janice Atkinson and the Netherlands’ far-right Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders at the European parliament in Brussels, Belgium, earlier this year.
The party had topped the vote in six of 13 regions on December 6, propelled by anger over the struggling economy and fears created by last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris that left 130 dead.
“We now have to take the time for in-depth debates about what worries the French, who expect strong and precise answers”, he said, citing Europe, unemployment, security and national identity as key issues.
“Nothing will stop us”, she told cheering supporters in northern France, where she lost a bid to run the region that includes the migrant flashpoint of Calais.
The FN now has an army of regional councillors, tripling its previous number around the country and turning it into an opposition force to be reckoned with.
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 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. Voters took selfies with a relaxed Mr Hollande, who scored a big diplomatic victory on Saturday by getting nearly 200 countries to agree a pact to limit global warming.
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After both led with more than 40% of the vote in the first round on 6 November, the Socialist candidates in those regions pulled out so their voters could support Republican candidates against the FN in the second round. Marion Marechal-Le Pen was quick to condemn the tactic in a bitter concession speech.
