No real winner in French elections, presidential race ahead

The reactions were mixed on the streets of Paris on Monday (December 14).

The National Front’s No. 2 official, Florian Philippot, who lost in the race in the eastern Alsace region, said the results don’t diminish the party’s chances for the presidential election in 2017.

Le Pen pledged to keep fighting to expand her party’s support and said in the coming weeks she would “rally all the French, of all origins, who want to join us”.

Turnout figures were 7 percent higher than for the previous regional elections in 2010, with 50.4 percent of those eligible to vote casting ballots by 5 p.m. (1600 GMT), three hours before polls were to close in big cities, according to the Interior Ministry.

“We have to encourage the public to vote for something rather than against it”, said PM Valls.

For Sarkozy, who faces a primary election inside his party next year to choose the opposition candidate for the presidential vote, the rise of the FN questions his claim to be a “rampart” against the far right.

Sarkozy paid “homage” to the voters who turned out for Sunday’s runoff elections after skipping the first round.

The FN had taken 28% of the vote nationally in the first round, ahead of 27 percent for the Republicans and their allies.

“We are proud… of the results”, he told supporters of his Republicans party.

“The National Front remains an isolated party that scares people”, Brice Teinturier, director at polling company Ipsos, said on France2 television Sunday. The results were met with boos and shouts of disgust and disappointment at the election headquarters of Marine Le pen in Henin-Beaumont in northern France.

“Tonight, no sigh of relief, no sign of triumphalism”, he said. While the Paris region was never expected to go to the far right, her remarks underscored the national dimension of the stakes.

It’s hard to imagine a more favourable year for the French National Front: unemployment at an 18-year high, euro-scepticism on the rise, security and immigration fears heightened by deadly armed attacks on the streets of Paris.

“France in moments of truth has always taken refuge in its real values”, Valls was quoted as saying.

Marine Le Pen has made attempts to broaden the National Front’s appeal by dropping the anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric of her father Jean-Marie, whom she expelled from the party he founded. She took positives from the results as the party had tripled its number of councillors and said that it was now “the first opposition force in many regional councils of France”.

This has left the Socialists totally absent from the councils in those two regions.

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 dam has held for the time being but the FN is making consistent progress in this country and at some point, the dam is going to break”, political analyst Stephane Rozes of the CAP think tank said. She ended up losing to the center-right in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region where she ran, despite leading in the first round of voting. The continued surge in popularity of the far-right means that the traditional left-right stand-off in the second round of the presidential election risks becoming a thing of the past, and this will dramatically change the landscape of French politics.

Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front collapsed in French regional elections Sunday after dominating the first round of voting, according to pollsters¿ projections.

The governing Socialists ordered their candidates to withdraw from the regions where Le Pen and Marechal-Le Pen were running and to vote for the right to block their candidacies.