French voters went to the polls on Sunday for regional elections that could give the far-right Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen a taste of power before next year’s national elections, when she is expected to be the main challenger to the incumbent president Emmanuel Macron.
Opinion polls suggested the RN would take the lead in six of the 13 French European regions in the first round of voting, although horse-trading between parties before the second round on June 27 was likely to exclude the party from power in all but the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur.
Even so, success on the French riviera in the second round, if it is achieved under RN candidate Thierry Mariani, would be the first time the anti-immigration party had won a French region.
“This Sunday, you will have the historic chance to create the change of government the country so badly needs,” Le Pen said on Twitter after campaign meetings across France.
With the left weakened and the centre-right now split between traditional republicans and supporters of Macron, Le Pen may do well in the final results even if the RN’s share of the overall vote in the first round is no greater than the 28 per cent it achieved in 2015.
Mujtaba Rahman, Europe managing director of consultancy Eurasia group, said a regional victory for Le Pen would be “a significant event in French political history, the first time that the far right has controlled anything larger than a medium-size town since the ending of the Nazi-sympathising Vichy regime in 1944”.
To run a region such as Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, with more than 4m inhabitants and big cities such as Marseille and Nice, would give Le Pen “unprecedented opportunities for grandstanding and troublemaking in the next 10 months before the first round of the presidential elections” — and sound a warning that a Le Pen victory over Macron in 2022 was no longer inconceivable, he said.
The regional and departmental councils for which the French are voting have limited powers, mostly over transport and schools, and turnout is expected to be low despite the vote’s significance as an indicator of national political trends.
Polling group Ipsos forecast that turnout would reach only about 41 per cent. “The French have their minds on other things completely,” Brice Teinturier of Ipsos told a webinar last week. “We are coming out of the pandemic . . . and the outlook for the economy is getting much better.”
But a low turnout, and polling that shows voters to be more concerned about crime, immigration and unemployment than Covid-19, are likely to help Le Pen make her mark.
“Abstention helps those voting blocs that are the most motivated, that is to say, usually the extremes,” François Bayrou, an ally of Macron and head of the MoDem party, told LCI television.
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Le Pen hopes French regional vote will give her taste of power - Financial Times
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