Setback of the extreme right of Marine Le Pen in the regional elections in France

The French far right of Marine Le Pen suffered a setback this Sunday in the first round of regional elections, where the right-wing opposition won a comfortable victory less than a year from the presidential elections.

At the national level, the right-wing party would obtain 29% of the vote, ahead of the extreme right (18.5%) and the Socialists (18%), according to the estimates of various polls.

The presidential party, La República en Marcha (LREM), has also suffered a severe defeat and its chances of winning a region are almost nil.

With only four years of existence, the centrist formation of President Emmanuel Macron has failed to win at the local level, yet it risks being decisive in the face of the second round to prevent the rise of the far right.

“I am not going to beat around the bush: yes, of course, we are disappointed to have obtained this result”, declared on RTL radio the head of the presidential party, Stanislas Guerini.

LREM expected to get 15% of the vote, perhaps even more in some areas, as some optimistic polls predicted. But the presidential party convinced only 10% of voters.

Worse still, he was eliminated in the second round in Occitanie, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and, above all, in the Hauts-deFrance, where Minister Laurent Pietraszewski would get just between 7.3% and 9.1%, despite the presence of four other members of the government on his list.

Also humiliating was the result for the presidential party, as it was triumphant for Xavier Bertrand (right), who collected between 39% and 46% of the vote, far ahead of the far right, and whose victory will be a ideal launch pad for your presidential campaign.

Although the Executive has always insisted that it would not submit to the results, the question of a cabinet reshuffle returned to the table, especially since a dozen ministers were candidates.

“Shock”

The party of Marine Le Pen, a finalist in the 2017 presidential elections, is estimated to have underperformed the early polls and the previous regional elections in 2015, in which it won in 6 regions.

“I call for a start” for the second round next Sunday, reacted the president of the far-right Regroupement national (RN, for its acronym in French), Marine Le Pen, from her stronghold of Hénin-Beaumont.

The party’s greatest hope was in the southeast of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) region, where its campaign was led by Thierry Mariani, former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy, who defected from the party from right The Republicans in 2019.

However, Mariani was neck and neck with the current head of the region, Renaud Muselier of Los Republicanos, with between 30 and 35% of the vote, according to estimates.

“We have foiled all the polls” in the region, welcomed the latter. Otherwise, RN is second in a significant number of regions, but does not appear to be able to win next Sunday.

The RN is hurt by the electoral system and has faced hostility from other parties for decades, often creating a united front against it in the second round.

The ecologists (EELV), who had obtained good results in the municipal elections of 2020, would collect 12% of the vote at the national level, according to various polls.

The vote, postponed due to the covid-19 pandemic, was marked by a record abstention of over 66%.

“The level of abstention is particularly worrying,” said Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.

“We can speak of a collapse in electoral participation”, summarized the political scientist Bruno Cautrès, researcher at Cevipof, explaining it by “a very important covid effect” but also by “the almost total absence of campaign on the questions regionalization “.

It is “a slap in the face to the entire political class,” said Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet, professor of political communication at Sciences Po.

With information from AFP