France election: ‘Disappointing night for the FN’

“The danger posed by the far right has not gone away, far from it”.

The party leader put a fearless face on the polls, saying it would not prevent the the “inexorable rise, election after election, of a national movement” on the far right.

“Frankly, I’m voting against the FN in the interests of my family”, said Issa Kouyate, a 59-year-old voter of Senegalese origin, as he cast his ballot in the southern city of Marseille, where a high proportion of citizens are of immigrant background.

The area includes the port of Calais, where up to 5,000 migrants are now sleeping rough as they try to get to Britain, where they will claim asylum or disappear into the black economy.

Other new supporters in the room included blue-collar workers and bourgeois suburbanites, recent university graduates and retirees.

The National Front ran an anti-immigration and at times Islamophobic campaign in a country that has more than 5 million Muslims.

Indeed, the day kicked off the unofficial election season as politicians from all parties cast Sunday’s results in terms of their presidential ambitions. According to the exit polls Sunday night, the Socialists won between three and six of the 13 regions, and the Republicans 5 – 9.

Both Ms Le Pen and niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen have lost in their respective regions after the Socialists withdrew and urged supporters to back the conservatives.

That, though, may be an exaggeration.

Marine Le Pen has moved to distance herself from the politics of her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, going …

Bertrand, a former labor minister, described the outcome as a “thunderbolt” that had stopped the “progression” of the National Front.

A TNS-Sofres poll on Wednesday showed Le Pen, who heads the party list in the economically depressed northeastern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region, would lose easily to the Republicans’ Xavier Bertrand.

Still, the National Front has momentum and the polls could turn out to be wrong, said Nonna Mayer, a political analyst at the National Center for Scientific Research. While political experts say the party is on the right to far-right, party members disagree.

“By tripling our number of councillors, we will be the main opposition force in most of the regions of France”. But they control sizable budgets, dispensing money for economic development, arts and culture.

The results from Sunday’s vote will be seen as a barometer of public opinion; a strong showing for the National Front would provide a lift for a Le Pen presidential campaign in 2017, her ultimate goal.

He said there were many unknowns, including the turnout. Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration National Front was the frontrunner heading into the decisive second round of F…

She lambasted France’s mainstream parties in a defiant speech.

Despite its loss, the National Front sent a message to the French. She said those who voted for her had resisted “intimidation, infantilization and manipulations”. “Long live the French Republic, long live the nation, long live France!” she wrote on Twitter.