Marine Le Pen far from humbled by National Front’s bruising defeat

The leader of France’s far-right National Front launched an all-out offensive Wednesday against her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, opposing his candidacy in upcoming elections and entering into an open war with the man who helped found the party more than four decades ago.

Following last Sunday’s results, the Socialist Party withdrew several of its candidates in the regions where it had come in third while encouraging supporters to vote for the Republican candidate to keep the National Front out of power. Despite winning six out of 13 regions in the first round, the party failed to gain control of any of the 13 regions in Sunday’s final vote.

Le Pen’s party won more votes than any other party nationally in last week’s first round, boosted by fears about security and immigration after the attacks in Paris in November that killed 130 people. “If it’s down to me that she wins, then I’ve done wrong”, he said. But despite that setback, the bigger story is the rising arc of support for the French far right.

For most of National Front’s supporters, there was a silver lining to the party’s defeat – there will be no Socialist representatives in the council in the northern and southern regions for the next five years.

It was a strategic win for the Socialist Party which embodied the Republican Front and closed the door to a victory on the part of the extreme right. But since it began an image change in 2011 under party leader Marine Le Pen to scrub away the stigma of anti-Semitism clinging to it, the National Front has become a threat for both left and right.

Philippe Richert finished in first place with 48.4 percent of the vote, putting the FN’s Florian Philippot in second place with 36 percent. And most importantly, the National Front failed to obtain the majority in any of the 13 regions.

In parliamentaryelections, only the top two in each constituency go to the second round, the same system used in presidential votes.

The contrast with the first round of voting on December 6 was stark – Marine Le Pen scored just over 42 per cent in the economically depressed Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie compared to almost 58 per cent for her centre-right rival Xavier Bertrand.

Le Pen is still likely to use the FN’s performance as a springboard for her bid for the presidency in 2017.

Although it won no region on Sunday 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.

The election was seen as an important measure of support for Le Pen ahead of 2017 presidential elections.

The other was Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, by Ms Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, fought in the south. The question for Le Pen, and the rest of French politics, will be whether events between now and then end up helping the National Front by playing into its anti-immigrant, nationalist rhetoric in the face of increased immigration from the Middle East and the threat of terrorism. The decision of the center-left and center-right to effectively join together to prevent the FN’s rise will feed Le Pen’s narrative that there is no real difference between the mainstream French parties.

“Tonight, there should be no relief, no triumphalism and no victory message: the danger of the far right has not been ruled out”, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said.

Prominent conservative Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet criticized Sarkozy’s strategy on Sunday, saying: “If voters had applied the ni/ni (neither/nor) rule, we would have lost [against Le Pen and her niece]”.