France far-right National Front loses all regional elections

The result for the Paris region is not in, but pollsters predict the conservatives have also won there. Official results are due today.

With presidential elections due in 2017, the anti-immigration FN had hoped the regional polls would act as a springboard for leader Marine Le Pen.

Fifteen years later, if Marine Le Pen makes the second round, it will not be a shock and she is likely to seriously narrow the gap.

Philippot said that “we gained several hundred thousand votes” despite the loss in Sunday’s final round of voting in regional elections.

Regional election boundaries were redrawn after the 2010 election, in which the Socialists had won 21 out of 22 regions.

For weeks, the Front and its supporters have boasted that it is France’s leading party, and that the country had become a three-party system: left, right, and – in the Front’s own terminology – nationalist.

The first round of voting on 6 December gave the FN the best election results in its history. But its law-and-order, anti-immigrant message appeared to resonate with many French voters one month after Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, with more than one in four casting their ballot for the Front.

The tables turned on Sunday as Bertrand beat Le Pen by almost 15 points.

“I salute the voters who responded to the appeal to block the far right”, Prime Minister Manuel Valls of the governing Socialist party said in a speech on Sunday night. “Tonight, no sign of relief, no sign of triumphalism”, he stated. He warned the “danger posed by the far right has not gone away, far from it”.

Estimates show the National Front has failed to win a single region despite big gains in the first round.

Never was this more apparent that in the row that has erupted over Hollande’s declaration in the wake of the Paris attacks that he would seek powers to strip any dual national convicted of terrorism offences of their French citizenship.

“France in moments of truth has always taken refuge in its real values”, Valls said.

Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National party failed to win a seat in any region in the second round of the regional elections. Le Pen captured 43 percent of the vote in her northern French region after Hollande’s Socialists pulled their candidate and threw their support behind the center-right candidate. “Rejoin them, together nothing can stop us, long live the French republic, long live the nation, long live France”. They have not won control of any regions, but they have increased their power base throughout their country and become a legitimate alternative to the traditional parties.

In a bid to keep the National Front from gaining power, the Socialists withdrew candidates who were trailing in key regions to avoid splitting the anti-National Front vote. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy is considered one of the favorites, but he’s facing high-profile competitors. “We might as well try the National Front”, said Mathieu Coze, 30, a train engineer who voted at a polling station in a maze of blocky, gray high-rise apartment buildings.

Le Pen supporters in a hall in the gritty northern town of Henin-Beaumont booed his image on a big screen as he spoke.

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.