French far-right fail to win single region
France’s National Front failed to win any regional assemblies in runoff elections Sunday, dealing a blow to leader Marine Le Pen’s efforts to build on a historic first-round result and prepare the far-right party for government.
“We mustn’t confuse regional elections fought on a different system with National Assembly elections, where the FN (National Front) has no chance at all of coming to power in the foreseeable future”, said Jim Shields, head of French studies at Aston University in Birmingham, England.
“Marine Le Pen into the second round in 2017 is a bet worth making”, Jean-Yves Camus, a researcher at Iris, a French political research institute, said in an interview last week. But in other regions, where several candidates competed in the second round, the PS won thanks to the right-wing vote being split between centre-right and far-right. Ms. Le Pen herself failed to capitalise on her high first-round score in the vast northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, after the Socialist party pulled out of the race and made an extraordinary plea for its voters to choose Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing Les REpublicains candidate Xavier Bertrand just to stop Ms. Le Pen. But she conceded nothing.Its the price to pay for the emancipation of a people, she said after the voting. “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”, Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls told reporters. Instead, the center-right Republicans took seven regions and the Socialists, who formerly headed all regions, five.
That intransigence, analysts say, is the key to both the National Front’s history and its destiny, and the reason – in the absence of truly dire economic conditions – that a takeover by the far right in France is not likely any time soon. But despite that setback, the bigger story is the rising arc of support for the French far right.
Yet, while voters may have denied the anti-immigration party the leadership of any of the country’s regions, it picked up more votes than ever before, leaving opponents scrambling for a strategy to counter it.
The party received 6.8 million votes in the second round, amounting to a 27.36% share of the vote.
Going into the regional elections, the party had capitalized on security concerns and anti-immigration sentiment in the wake of last month’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris. As a result, the National Front has doubled the number of elected regional council representatives (42, compared to 21 previously).
Enough to make Francois Hollande smile at the prospect of a run-off with Marine Le Pen in a year and a half with the whole country ready for the “Republican comeback”.
France’s two-round presidential election will be held in the spring of 2017.
She took over the party from her rabble-rousing father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2011 and has worked hard to improve its image, but it remains staunchly nationalistic, and Marine Le Pen has said migration into Europe recalls the “barbarian invasions” of the fourth century.
She was charged in July 2014 after her immunity as a member of the European Parliament was lifted following a vote requested by French authorities.