Socialists pull out in bid to halt French far-Right
FRANCE’S National Front leader has accused the governing Socialists of ‘collective suicide’ after they withdrew from elections in a bid to stop her party gaining power.
Marine Le Pen celebrated yesterday after her far-Right party (FN) won up to 30 per cent of the national vote in the first round of regional elections.
‘The people expressed themselves, and with the people, France raises her head,’ she said after FN’s anti-immigrant agenda delivered the most spectacular results in its history – beating its previous record of 25 per cent in European Parliament elections last year.
This time, votes for Miss Le Pen broke the symbolic 40 per cent mark in the Pas-de-Calais region, where around 5,000 UK-bound refugees are sleeping rough.
But the ruling Socialist Party announced yesterday that its candidates would fall on their swords in two regions where FN is most likely to win power in the second round.
It urged its voters to back former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republican Party to keep FN out of power. Socialist candidates withdrew from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region where Miss Le Pen is standing and the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, where her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen, 25, is running.
But Miss Le Pen said this marked ‘the beginning of the disappearance, pure and simple, of the Socialist Party’, adding that withdrawing candidates from the second round was ‘neither loyal nor democratic’ and was ‘treating its voters like ballot fodder’. She said the Socialists had ‘decided to commit a collective suicide’ in doing so.
The Socialists, who controlled all but one French region, came top in only two on Sunday, mustering just 23.5 per cent of the national vote. The French are electing 1,671 regional councillors. More crucially, the current round of voting will establish control of 13 ‘super regions’, created last year from 22 areas whose boundaries were re-drawn.
The system is based on proportional representation. If no party receives an absolute majority in the first round, a second round takes place, as is happening on Sunday.
The regions are not hugely powerful, but the overall vote will indicate parties’ popularity ahead of presidential elections in 2017.
Miss Le Pen’s anti-immigration stance has become increasingly popular following the Paris attacks which saw bogus asylum-seekers among the killers. But she conceded it will be very hard for a party with two MPs to translate a huge regional vote into national power.