French voters dealt a sharp setback to the far-right National Front (FN) in regional elections, depriving the party of victory in any of the country’s 13 regions, an outcome which its leader Marine Le Pen blamed on tactical voting.
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The other was Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, by Ms Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, fought in the south. The remaining 42 seats were taken by the National Front, led by Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.
If confirmed, the results would be a disappointment for Le Pen, who had hoped to use victories as a springboard for presidential and general elections in 2017.
Leader of the National Front (FN) Marine Le Pen lost to the conservative Republican party in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, despite the first round of voting giving her 40 per cent of the vote. The left withdrew candidates in two regions, calling on its supporters to vote for the conservatives as a way to block the Front.
But in other regions, where several candidates competed in the second round, the PS won thanks to the right-wing vote being split between centre-right and far-right.
The first round of the regional elections saw the National Front leading in six out of 13 regions, increasing its share of the national vote to 28, percent from 11 percent in similar elections in 2010.
However, yesterday’s results were no real victory for either party, shaken by the far-right’s growing appeal to disillusioned voters.
But Sunday 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.
Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen spun a positive spin on her defeat, claiming that nothing could stop her party’s momentum as it won a historically high number of votes (6.6 million).
“Tonight has actually shown that a National Front presence in the second round still mobilizes a majority to get out and vote against it”, said Charles Lichfield, France analyst at political-risk consultancy Eurasia.
The biggest victor in terms of electoral success was the centre-right Les Républicains, winning seven of the country’s 13 regions that went to poll in the French mainland.
But they lost the top proze, the Ile-de-France region, which includes Paris, where Claude Bartolone, the president of the National Assembly, was narrowly defeated.
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The question for Le Pen, and the rest of French politics, will be whether events between now and then end up helping the National Front by playing into its anti-immigrant, nationalist rhetoric in the face of increased immigration from the Middle East and the threat of terrorism. A similar dynamic was in play in departmental elections in March, when more than half of the left’s voters switched to the mainstream right candidate in the second round, and the right won 535 out of 538 contests with the National Front. Naturally, there followed much discussion in French political and media circles as to whether the party would, for the first time, take control of one or more of France’s regional administrations in the second round. This was the ultimate test of power from the main political parties before the presidential elections that are to be held in spring 2017.
