National Front seen losing two contested regions in French election runoffs

The National Front won far more votes than its mainstream rivals in the first round last Sunday, securing nearly 30% of votes overall and taking the lead in six out of 13 regions.

Philippot’s status reflects the changes in the party since Marine Le Pen took over from her rabble-rousing father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011 and sought to broaden the party’s appeal. But it faces an uphill battle to convert that win after the ruling Socialist Party withdrew its candidates from two regions and urged their supporters there to back Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans.

France’s far-right National Front will not garner enough votes in election runoffs to win two key regions where it had come out on top in a first round of voting, a poll showed on Wednesday.

Polls suggest that the National Front will likely be unable to match its success in the second round of voting Sunday because one-on-one votes will favor the more traditional parties.

Yet perhaps the most startling global censure was revealed by the “New York Times”, which on Thursday ran an editorial on the recent regional election victories of the far-right Front National in France. Without allies from which it can draw fresh support and faced with collusion between parties that have governed nationally, the National Front risks being shut out of office yet again.

Dr. Esther Lopatin, director of the European Studies program at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, said that Europeans are frustrated by leaders who have ignored their concerns about rapid immigration and radical Islam on the continent. He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a unsafe “them” or unnamed other – usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties.

Marechal-Le Pen has also said she would stop subsidies to family planning charities, which she accuses of being politicized and of promoting abortion. “The French people are fed up and it’s time to change things”, he said. But, the far right from Geert Wielders to Orban will often use the need to “protect Europe’s Jews” as a legitimating argument for blanket anti-Muslim rhetoric.

They have never had to be accountable, so people are increasingly asking themselves “Why not the FN?'” But the party’s hopes of winning its first-ever region could be dashed by its opponents’ political manoeuvering.

Indeed, it’s the long-term political decomposition of the French political class, and its turning away from the electorate, that has enriched the soil in which FN has now taken root.

A survey by Elabe pollsters showed the conservative candidate attracting 43 percent of the vote in that region, slightly ahead of the Front’s number 2 official Florian Philippot, who would get 41 percent. But also Turkish democrats, frustrated about what they perceive as the EU’s unethical refugee deal with Ankara and European silence on human right violations in Turkey, should think twice before joining the choir of anti-EU forces.

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, who heads the country’s center-left Social Democrats, spoke for many when he called the French vote this week “a wake-up call for all democrats in Europe”.

“Even when they are not in power, populists warp the agenda”, it added. It is being imported, through mass immigration, and the sudden increase in the Muslim population.

“The National Front is an excellent first-round party”, said Camus.