Immigration, jobs, shifting politics in French regional vote

France is due to hold the second round of regional elections in which the far-right National Front (FN) is seeking to consolidate its gains from a week ago. “National Front leader Marine Le Pen said Thursday when questioned about Trump’s plan in a television interview, according to the New York Times”. The ultra-nationalist FN, which wants to suspend immigration and pull France out of the euro, topped the vote in six of 13 regions in the first round of voting last weekend, confirming its status as France’s most popular party.

Le Pen’s 115 page-long program for the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region says French secularism would be “strictly implemented”. The same was true for Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal Le Pen, who had an identical showing within the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, a stronghold of the normal right.

The FN won 27.73% of the vote in the first round, followed by Mr Sarkozy’s Republicans on 26.65% and President Francois Hollande’s Socialists with 23.12%.

But the outcome Sunday remains unclear.

Ms. Le Pen said that was too much for her, perhaps in part because she feared jeopardizing the progress she had made in shedding her party’s previous image as racist and anti-Semitic. The Socialists have sacrificed their candidates in the regions where Ms Le Pen and her niece are running, calling on voters to back the opposition.

Since Le Pen took the FN over from her maverick, ex-paratrooper father Jean-Marie in 2011, she has strived to build a base of locally elected officials to help “de-demonize” the party and target the 2017 national elections. The party bash has-been making steady electoral progress since well before Islamist extremists waged deadly assaults in Paris in Jan. & Nov., taking the most noteworthy share of the French vote in European Parliamentary elections last yr: 25%.However analysts stated the party bash’s longstanding calls for for a crackdown on immigration & criticism of the European Union’s open borders are resonating much more now with a frightened & furious public, particularly “cause it emerged in that a few of the militants who killed 130 people last month could have infiltrated the huge wave of refugees fleeing Syria to slip in to Europe”.

That resonates with many voters frustrated that governments left and right have failed to bring down France’s 10 percent unemployment and at France’s shrinking global economic clout.

The Republicans pushed the ruling Socialists into third place in the first round. Though the party did receive strong support (more than 6 million votes) in some of France’s most densely populated regions, it will not be enough to win the presidency.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative Republicans party may come out on top Sunday, taking several regions.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a Socialist campaigning for weeks against the National Front, played the greatest anxiety card Friday, saying on France Inter radio that “the extreme right supporters section … that could cause civil war”.