France’s far-Right challenges for role of opposition
Le Pen’s Front National triples its regional councillors and leaves Sarkozy’s party in disarray
FRANCE entered a new political era yesterday as the far-Right Front National positioned itself as the main opposition and the traditional Right dissolved into in-fighting.
After regional elections in which the FN hit a historic high, Nicolas Sarkozy immediately called a politburo meeting of his conservative party The Republicans and fired his number two, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, with whom he had clashed over electoral strategy.
“We need a new team,” said Mr Sarkozy after The Republicans won seven regions, while President François Hollande’s Socialists took five. The FN candidate came first in Corsica.
Tactical voting kept the far-Right party from winning a single region despite its strong showing in the first round, in which it came top in six out of 13 regions and took the largest chunk of the national vote.
Four million more people voted in the second round to keep the FN out, with turnout at almost 60 per cent.
However, the FN smashed its previous record in a national election and increased its score in round two. The far-Right won 6.8 million votes on Sunday, almost 400,000 more than Marine Pen, its leader, garnered in the 2012 presidential elections.
The FN now commands an army of regional councillors, tripling their number and turning it into an opposition force to be reckoned with.
“We have elected officials across France. It’s unprecedented,” said Florian Philippot, FN vice president.
Ms Le Pen can argue that the established parties are ganging up against her. On Sunday she denounced a “campaign of calumnies and defamation decided in the gilded palaces of the Republic”. It is a line she will repeat ahead of the presidential election in 2017.
Mr Sarkozy’s party had little cause for celebration; despite clinching seven regions, an almost miraculous outcome given their first round score, The Republicans came out weakened from the election, in which the historic division between the mainstream and far-Right looked decidedly porous.
They wrested control of the Paris region for the first time in 17 years, but only kept the FN at bay in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardy and Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur because the Socialists dropped out and their supporters voted tactically. Mr Sarkozy had refused to withdraw any of his candidates in a similar manner.
The mainstream Right is now brac- ing itself for a bitter battle. Should it take a hard-Right line à la Sarkozy or be more moderate and inclusive?
While the ruling Socialists lost a string of regions, the result was far less catastrophic for them than expected.
It vindicated Prime Minister Manuel Valls’s tactic of sacrificing candidates to block the FN and means it is highly likely Mr Hollande will run again in the next presidential election in 2017. Since the Paris terrorist attacks, his approval ratings have risen dramatically.
French politics has been granted a stay of execution. Collaboration between mainstream parties of Left and Right in this weekend’s regional elections has succeeded in keeping out the Front National (FN); the six regions it initially looked like seizing all ended up eluding its grasp. Still, collaboration is not a word much admired in France, and those who have described the result as a humiliation for FN leader Marine Le Pen are badly misguided.
This is a time for momentary relief, perhaps, but not hubristic celebration. The rise of the FN in the last two decades has been inexorable. The party made its move to prominence under the bombastic leadership of Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie. Now she has guided it towards acceptability. Gone are the days when one Frenchman in 10 would vote FN, then lie about it. At these elections, one in three voted for the FN, and Marine herself scored well above 40 per cent. That positions her handily for a tilt at the French presidency 18 months hence.
She is not there yet. But the fact that the political establishment effectively organised a stitch-up to deprive her of office this time hardly defangs the FN’s narrative of elites conspiring to do down the little man. And the ramifications of her winning the presidency are almost too dramatic to imagine. Though it is often portrayed as far-Right, the FN borrows from both Right and Left: while the election of a President Le Pen might deal a fatal blow to the EU project, for example, her party’s protectionist impulses are hardly the stuff of freemarket dreams.
Between now and 2017’s presidential election, France’s political elites must do something that they have so far singularly failed to do – stop handwringing and actually address the issues behind the rise of the FN. It is not enough to decry Madame Le Pen’s agenda as “populist” as though widespread appeal somehow disbars issues from serious political consideration. Yesterday, a teacher in a school near Paris claimed he was stabbed by an Islamic State terrorist. It turned out to be a fabrication. But that in itself only highlights an unaddressed hysteria about extremism. Failures of integration are one toxic well of discontent that the FN taps; another is unemployment running at almost 11 per cent. Amid the turbulence, the French state behemoth swims serenely on, unperturbed. That apparent indifference must change. For this reprieve is only temporary.