Election Update

The latest percentages at Le Salon Beige are as follows:

The Socialist Party - 36.2%
The UMP Party - 18.6%
The Front National - 11.56%

The FN had two winners - in Carpentras where Patrick Bassot won 54% and in Brignoles where Jean-Paul Dispard won by five votes over the incumbent Communist.

Here are some comments from LSB readers:

- The elections are a failure for the normalizing strategy initiated by Marine Le Pen. (Note: "normalizing" here means making the party respectable).

To which another reader responded:

- Your judgments are a wonder in that they are never backed up: the 10% for the FN are the figures of the Interior Minister who calculates by combining the cantons, i.e., those cantons where the FN was present with those cantons where it was absent. This was already the case in the first round when the minister's 15.2% was in reality 19% (…)

Note: This comment is supported by another reader who cites the figure of 41% for the FN in those cantons where there was a candidate. This is a huge difference. The figure of 11% applies to all cantons, but in the second round the FN only ran in about 400 cantons, out of the original 1400.

Marine Le Pen confirms the figure of 40% (not 41) in a spontaneous interview in which she confronted Jean-François Copé, spokesman for the UMP party. She did not lose her temper but she denounced the contempt that the UMP has for the little people, the candidates of the FN, to which he responded that the FN was showing its true face. The scene is on video (for now) at François Desouche.

Note that figures always vary until at some point the blogs get it right. The FN had said last week that 1500 candidates were running in the first round. Now they are saying that 1400 ran.

More comments:

- Look, Marine Le Pen is not perfection incarnate, but she is the lesser evil who can rally the French patriots to resist the thieves, the rotten UMPS system, etc… Sure, the KING is the solution for our country, you don't need a college degree to realize that. It's a simple truth and if Catholics (traditional or not) would only stop going to bed with this rotten regime things would be a lot better. It goes without saying, Long Live the King, but at the same time you have to be realistic and support the patriots who defend France, particularly those who can make themselves heard. Like it or not, today it is the FN with Le Pen.

In other related news, Le Figaro reports that a poll conducted by Ipsos for France Télévisions predicts that Marine Le Pen will qualify for the second round of the presidential elections, no matter what else happens.