France’s far-right showed yesterday that it was still a force to be reckoned with in party politics after the National Front made a surprisingly strong showing in the first round of regional elections.
The comeback of the National Front came as France was reeling from a year-long recession that has sent unemployment soaring and followed a public debate on national identity that exposed fears about immigration.
Front National (FN) founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, 81, appeared jubilant on TV after results showed the party scored a sizeable 11.55 percent of the vote, confounding analysts’ predictions.
“The National Front was declared beaten, dead, buried by the president,” he said late on Sunday. “This shows that it is still a national force and probably destined to become greater and greater.”
The strong showing put the FN in the running for round two on Sunday, taking its anti-immigrant message to 12 of the 22 regions on France’s mainland.
Party lists must garner at least 10 percent of the vote to qualify for the second round in the regional elections.
The outcome marked a resurgence of the far-right from its dismal showing of 6.8 percent in European elections last year and the puny 4.3 percent won by Le Pen in the 2007 presidential vote.
“This means that the far-right is not dead,” said Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far-right at the French Institute of Strategic and International Relations.
“It is not a party of government, but it is a party that can hobble the political system. It is a party of protest,” Camus said.
Camus said the result also reflected the discontent of far-right voters who massively defected from the National Front during the 2007 presidential vote to back French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
“They were won over by his promises of restoring the value of work and his message on law and order. Nowadays, they don’t connect with him,” Camus said.
The result was better than that predicted by analysts who put far-right support at just under 10 percent nationally, but still less than the 14.7 percent registered in the last regional vote in 2004.
Le Pen campaigned on his signature themes of halting immigration and opposing European integration that he believes pose a threat to the French way of life.
During its campaign, the FN sought to tap into fears about Islam when it released a poster that read “No to Islamism,” showing a Muslim woman fully veiled and an Algerian flag plastered over a map of France with minarets portrayed as missiles.
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