“It’s getting closer”, warns French leftist daily Libération on its front page Monday, alongside a blurry picture of France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen, one day after her far-right party topped the vote in the first round of the country’s regional elections.
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France’s traditional political parties have held a series of emergency meetings to thrash out tactics to defeat the Front National after the far right scored a historic victory in the first round of local elections.
I’m not a fan of Le Pen or her National Front party, but when the rest of France’s political establishment, including the so-called conservatives, is so consistently weak-minded, it should not surprise us that French voters would respond to Le Pen’s clarity and directness.
The National Front “is the only (party) that defends an authentic French republic, a republic with only one vocation: the national interest, the development of French employment, the conservation of our way of life, the development of our tradition and the defense of all the French”, Le Pen said Sunday night in Lille.
An opinion poll in Le Parisien on Monday suggested LR and its centre-right allies, including the centrist MoDem party, will poll 59% of the vote in the second round next Sunday, against 41% for the FN.
Although a shift toward the policies of the National Front Party had been in place for several years now, the November 13th attacks hastened the process, and will continue to do so as France prepares to vote on a new president in 2017.
The party were criticised over an election poster imploring voters to “Choose Your Suburb”, accompanied by a picture of a veiled woman, and an unveiled woman with the French tricolore painted on her cheeks. The anti-Europe, anti-immigration party has been gaining ground for years among voters fearful of unemployment and immigration and disillusioned by mainstream politics.
Meanwhile, Socialist Party secretary-general Jean-Christophe Cambadelis said the party would withdraw from at least three National Front-dominated regions in the second round, on December 13. She also said that she was optimistic about the second round. Former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, the father of Marine, reached the 2002 presidential run-off, which he then lost badly.
The early estimates showed Marine Le Pen taking a whopping 40 percent of the vote in the economically depressed northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, once a bastion of the left.
Le Pen has demanded a crackdown on Islamists in France.
Ahead of the vote, Valls urged party activists to “appeal to patriotism” to ensure a massive turnout, with Le Pen accusing him of waging “total war” against her.
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“To pull out a candidate on the second round is rather unfair”.
