France’s far-right collapses in regional runoff elections

National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who had appeared to be on the cusp of winning the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, lost out to center-right candidate Xavier Bertrand, who won 56% of the vote to her 44%.

“With a 50% participation rate, Le Pen took 6-million votes, so we can roughly estimate that she could take up to 9-million votes in a presidential election, or 23%”, said Yves-Marie Cann, director of political studies at pollsters Elabe.

The left-leaning Liberation newspaper said in an editorial it was fear of the far-right which had mobilised the left, rather than any renewed enthusiasm for the Socialists.

Ms Marine Le Pen said the result would not discourage the “inexorable rise, election after election, of a national movement” behind her party.

Le Pen’s niece, Marion MarEchal-Le Pen, 26, an MP and rising party star hoping to lead the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Cute d’Azur, was also kept out by the tactical voting of the left for another Sarkozy candidate, the hard-line mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi.

On Friday, Fitch Ratings affirmed France’s credit rating at AA, with a stable outlook, noting that it “does not expect the December regional and 2017 presidential elections to derail reform or fiscal plans for 2016-17”.

The Front National may have been shut out of office, but the party’s overall strong showing points to the its arrival as the third major force in French politics.

Writing in The National, SNP MP George Kerevan remarked that the relative success of FN in recent years was due in part to the “siren calls of populist demagogy” and the “fatal lack of worldwide solidarity” between anti-austerity movements.

For Marine Le Pen and her allies, the National Front’s failure to win a single region in local elections Sunday is a bump on the road toward her real political objective: reaching the second round of a presidential battle in 2017. Build the Scotland you want to live in – support our new media. This political force of the extreme right that has sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, secured nearly 28 percent of voters, which resulted in only the third place for them. The danger of the extreme right is not averted.

The conservatives were boosted to victory in the two Le Pen races with help from the Socialists who withdrew their candidates, asking voters to give their ballots to the mainstream rival.

Although the NF received more votes in the first round than ever before, it did so poorly the following week that even its party chief, Marine Le Pen, did not win. The main one is the National Front’s total vote tally in the election’s second round – which, at almost 7 million, represents a clear increase not just on its first-round score, but also on its previous high water mark, in the 2012 presidential election.

Speaking after the results, Prime Minister Manuel Valls hailed the far-right’s defeat but warned that there should be “no relief, no triumphalism”, following the far right’s results in the first round.

“In the name of the Republic’s values, they sabotaged democracy”, said Maréchal-Le Pen, the niece of the party’s president.

France’s two-round voting system served as a democratic safety valve, giving the electorate a chance to rethink the outcome.

The 47-year-old had been accused of “inciting discrimination, violence or hatred toward a group of people based on their religious beliefs” over the comments she made on the campaign trail in December 2010.