France’s National Front Defeated, For Now

Yet, while voters may have denied the anti-immigration party the leadership of any of the countrys regions, it picked up more votes than ever before, leaving opponents scrambling for a strategy to counter it. Sundays runoff in regional elections became a national referendum on the far right, which led handily in six of 13 regions after the first round a week earlier.

That not only stands Ms Le Pen in good stead for the presidential elections of 2017 but changes the entire French political landscape. “The danger of the far right has not been removed – far from it – and I won’t forget the results of the first round and of past elections”.

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

If the major parties don’t manage to set France on an upward trajectory then such tactics risk tainting the centre-right opposition with the failures of the Socialist Government, leaving the Front as the only contender with clean hands.

The far-right party got 6.71 million votes, more than in the first round (6.01 million).

Ms. Le Pen made her presidential ambitions for 2017 clear: “This distinction will be what is fundamentally at stake in the huge political decision of the presidential elections”. After the Socialists pulled out of its key target regions and urged their supporters to back the conservatives of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, the FN still recorded its best showing in its history.

Le Pen was expected to win the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais but suffered an upset to the Republican candidate Xavier Bertrand, losing 58 percent to 42 percent.

Alain Juppe, one of Sarkozy’s biggest rivals among conservatives in the bid for the presidency in 2017, said the FN’s defeat was “a sign of good health for our democracy”. Compared to regional elections held five years ago, the Socialists saw their support plummet by 16 percent this time around.

But that approach has its risks.

Some of the party’s campaign proposals, namely its offer to withdraw from the eurozone, are still a turn-off for mainstream voters. While mainstream parties have been hesitant to make the obvious connection between the terrorism on the French streets and the radical Islam, Front National’s Marine Le Pen has no such inhibitions. Of the 12 regions in mainland France, the Republicans won seven and the Socialists five.

Yet even without reaching the top rung, populists have forced mainstream conservatives to take a more restrictive line on immigration and multiculturalism, and resist further European integration.

 France’s main centre-left newspaper, Le Monde, echoed this sentiment, saying the FN was “defeated but also reinforced” and that other parties had won a “joyless success”.

Away from the limelight on its three main target regions, the FN also gained ground in three-way races in rural regions and declining industrial areas blighted by high unemployment.

“Nothing can stop us”, Le Pen crowed on Sunday. Unemployment reached its highest level for 18 years in the third quarter, well above 10% and higher than the eurozone average for the first time since 2007. “This distinction will be the grand distinction of the presidential elections”.

Ms Marine Le Pen said the result would not discourage the “inexorable rise, election after election, of a national movement” behind her party. “They are very good in the first round, but they crash in the second”, Mr. Lebourg said Sunday night of the National Front. At this point who can say?