The French far-right National Front (FN) on Sunday failed to win a single region in elections despite record results, as voters flocked to traditional parties to keep them out of power.
With presidential elections due in 2017, the anti-immigration FN had hoped the regional polls would act as a springboard for leader Marine Le Pen.
However, despite a best-ever national vote tally for the FN, she was trounced by the right-wing opposition in the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region after the ruling French Socialists pulled out of the race before the second round.
Photo: AP
Her 26-year-old niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, was also clearly defeated by the right-wing grouping in the southern region that includes the resorts of the Cote d’Azur, despite dominating the first round last week.
The party had topped the vote in six of 13 regions on Dec. 6, with a 28 percent national share, propelled by anger over the struggling economy and fears created by last month’s militant attacks in Paris that left 130 dead.
However, exactly a month on from those attacks, voters turned out in force — about 58 percent took part, an increase of 50 percent in the first round — and once again trounced the FN when it came down to the wire.
The ruling Socialists of French President Francois Hollande won in five regions, while the center-right alliance of his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy took seven.
Nationalists won in Corsica.
One of the biggest upsets on Sunday came in the Paris region, which shifted from left to right for the first time in 17 years.
French Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that despite the result “the danger of the far-right has not been removed, far from it.”
Sarkozy, leader of the Republicans party, praised the voters who turned out on Sunday, but said “the warnings” of the first round must not be forgotten.
The front page of conservative daily Le Figaro said: “The right wins, the left holds up, the FN falls,” but the Catholic newspaper Le Croix was more succinct, saying only: “Everybody loses.”
In an editorial titled “Not a victory but the absence of defeat,” left-wing Liberation said it was fear of the far-right which had mobilized the left, rather than any renewed enthusiasm for the French Socialist Party.
Final results showed Le Pen scored around 42 percent to nearly 58 percent for her right-wing rival Xavier Bertrand in the economically depressed north.
Her niece took around 45 percent of the vote to nearly 55 percent for her right-wing rival in the FN’s traditional stronghold in Provence-Alpes-Cote-d’Azur.
Both women had easily won the first round.
In a combative speech to supporters after polls closed, Le Pen said “nothing can stop us now.”
“In its northern and southern bastions we’ve eradicated the evil-doing Socialist Party,” she said.
“By tripling our number of councilors, we will be the main opposition force in most of the regions of France,” she added.
The FN has topped European and local polls over the past two years, bolstering Le Pen’s claim that it is now “the first party of France.”
The party on Sunday also recorded its best-ever score with 6.8 million votes nationally, up from just over six million in the first round and 6.4 million for Marine Le Pen in her 2012 presidential bid, when overall turnout was considerably higher.
However, the results showed once again that the party struggles in the deciding round as mainstream voters gang up to keep it from power as they did in 2002 when voters switched to Jacques Chirac in a presidential run-off against Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
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