The French far-right National Front (FN) party saw record gains in the first round of regional polls on Sunday, held under a state of emergency just three weeks after Islamic extremists killed 130 people in Paris.
Despite the strong result, it faces an uphill battle to clinch a run-off vote next week after Socialists withdrew candidates in an attempt to block it from power.
The FN came first with about 28 percent of the vote nationwide and topped the list in at least six of 13 regions, according to final estimates from the Ministry of the Interior. FN leader Marine Le Pen and her 25-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen broke the symbolic 40 percent mark in their respective regions, shattering previous records for the party as they tapped into voter anger over a stagnant French economy and security fears linked to Europe’s refugee crisis.
Photo: EPA
Marine Le Pen, a lawyer by training, welcomed the “magnificent result,” saying that it proved the FN was “without contest the first party of France.”
A grouping of right-wing parties took 27 percent, official estimates showed, while the ruling Socialist Party and its allies took 23.5 percent.
The polls were held under tight security following France’s worst-ever terror attacks, which have thrust the FN’s anti-immigration and often Islamophobic message to the fore.
Around half the 45 million registered voters took part in the polls.
Any party which secures 10 percent backing in the first round has the right to present candidates in the second round, due on Sunday.
Final estimates showed 47-year-old Le Pen taking a whopping 40.5 percent of the vote in the economically depressed northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, once a bastion of the left.
Marechal-Le Pen did equally well in the vast southeastern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, known for its beaches and countryside.
The far-right success triggered an immediate debate among the mainstream parties as to whether, in regions where they trailed third, they should urge voters to back the candidate opposing the FN.
Socialist leader Jean-Christophe Cambadelis said his party would withdraw from the second round in the regions Le Pen and her niece were leading in order “to block” the FN.
However, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, head of the Republicans, which leads the right-wing grouping, repeated his refusal to do the same in key polls where the Socialists were the strongest opposition.
“We must hear and understand the profound exasperation of the French people,” he said.
Le Pen said she was “not worried” by Socialist plans to withdraw, but acknowledged that “things will obviously be a bit less straightforward.”
Right-wing daily Le Figaro and communist L’Humanite both went with Le Choc (shock) after the result yesterday on their front page, while left-wing newspaper Liberation said: “It’s coming.”
Le Parisien carried a poll predicting that, faced with a straight choice in the second round between an FN and a right-wing candidate, 59 percent would vote for the conservative and 41 percent for the far-right party.
French President Francois Hollande has seen his personal ratings surge as a result of his hardline approach since the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.
However, his Socialist Party has languished behind the FN and the center-right Republicans.
The FN’s anti-EU and anti-immigrant narrative has been a lightning rod for many French who have lost faith in mainstream parties after years of double-digit unemployment and a sense of deepening inequality.
Victories next week would not only hand control of a regional government to the FN for the first time, but would also give Le Pen a springboard for her presidential bid in 2017. She has tried to “de-demonise” the party since taking over the reins in 2011, distancing herself from the more overt racism of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen — this year going as far as to eject him from the party he cofounded.
The FN’s repeated linking of immigration with terrorism has also helped it climb in the polls since the gun and suicide bombing assaults in Paris.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.