Fat lady has yet to sing.

French PM’s victory cigar proves a little premature

Published: 23 Mar 2015 12:51 GMT+01:00

After hearing that the far-right National Front had not come out on top in Sunday’s local elections, French PM Manuel Valls is said to have sat back and smoked a cigar. However there’s more than one reason why Valls may have lit up prematurely.

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Following the results there was much talk of the wheels having come off the Le Pen bandwagon, but portraying the outcome of the first round as a failure for the party leader is missing the point, and talk of Le Pen’s powers being on the wane is premature to say the least.

For a start, although figures show the centre-right UMP-UDI alliance picked up around 30 percent of the vote compared to 25.2 percent for the FN, if the results are analysed a different way then things look a lot rosier for Le Pen.

Figures from the Ministry of Interior reveal a more detailed breakdown party by party and when the centre-right alliance is broken up into individual parties like the UMP, Union de la Droite and UDI,  then the FN, which makes no political alliances, comes out on top after having polled 3,196,917 votes (see figures above).

It’s worth also remembering that the National Front score is historic one for the party, who up until Sunday had only achieved 15 percent of the vote in the “departemental” elections. The FN also picked up eight seats after the first round of voting, which it had never done before.

Le Pen’s party has also entrenched its position in certain parts of the country.

Much was made about how the party would do in those areas that have been ruled by National Front mayors since the local elections last year. But suggestions that voters would realise their mistake and vote against the National Front on Sunday have proved false as the party has attracted loyal support in areas like Frejus, Henin-Beaumont, in the northern France and Beaucaire in the south.

“In the end it’s a very good result for Le Pen,” French political scientist Philippe Marliere tells The Local.

“It shows they are getting stronger locally and they are getting people elected, especially in the south. It’s all going to plan for Le Pen.”

“The FN is making grounds, it’s becoming deeply rooted in the French political landscape. The votes they receive are not protest votes, they are ‘identity’ votes. It’s people who think, ‘all the others are corrupt or they’ve failed and we haven’t tried the National Front’. “

 Read it all here.