"A Strong Showing" for the Front National

Update: March 22, 2011 - According to a reader I misread the results. The Front National came in first in 40 cantons. I assumed that meant it had a majority in those races, and therefore a second round would not be necessary. This is not the case. The FN did receive the highest number of votes, but not the 50% majority needed to do away with the second round. I'm very sorry about this error. The FN did well, not as well as we would have liked, but Marine Le Pen, despite her satisfaction over the results did not display a triumphalist attitude. She is, and I hope will continue to be, cautious about all elections results, polls, and commentary.

The Front National will participate in the second round of elections in 399 cantons, according to LCI.TF1. The party had deployed about 1500 candidates. Therefore, roughly 1100 FN candidates did not win enough votes to proceed to next Sunday's run-off. However, it appears that this result is not at all bad, and in fact 39 FN candidates won a majority of votes, eliminating the need for a second round. (Note: Le Salon Beige gives the number as 40.)

Another article quotes Marine Le Pen who spoke of a "strong showing" by the Front National and called the election "historic." The article also provides the following results:

(…) the Socialist Party obtained 25.11% of the votes, the UMP (Sarkozy's party) 17.13%, the Front National 15.26%, the Front de gauche more than 9% and Europe Ecologie-Les Verts 8.3%, according to the Interior Ministry. (…) The presidential majority was credited with 32.5% via additional votes from the right, a tactic that angered both the Front National and the Socialists. Participation in the election appears not to have gone beyond 45%, a record low for this type of election.

Note: The Front National has issued a communiqué warning about the methods used by the Interior Ministry to report the results. As stated above, the Ministry "padded" the UMP's results by adding to it votes from other right-wing parties, instead of enumerating all parties separately.

Recriminations shot back and forth between Prime Minister François Fillon and the Socialist leaders. When Fillon urged the voters of the "republican right" to gather around their values, the chairman of the Socialist Party, Martine Aubry, deplored that, for the first time, a republican party had chosen the Front National instead of the "front republican".

What this means is that she expected Fillon and the UMP party to form an alliance (known as the "front republicain") with the Socialists against the FN. This is a common occurrence in France where any political bed partner is better than the FN. However, another leading Socialist, François Hollande, explicitly called on Socialists to vote for the UMP in those cantons where there is no Socialist candidate.

So next Sunday in about 400 cantons the FN will face either a Socialist or an UMP candidate. And in those cantons where there is no Socialist running we can expect leftists to vote for any party except the Front National.

One other piece of good news: Véronique Besse of the MPF, the party of Philippe de Villiers who governed the department of Vendée for so many years, won a majority in the first round in the canton of Herbiers. She is a person of traditional values, pro-family and certainly an asset in Vendée, now that Villiers is no longer president of the General Council. A reader at Le Salon Beige regards this as proof that Vendée still favors those close to Philippe de Villiers.

Below, a graph showing the percent of votes for the FDG (Left Front, including the Communists), the Socialist Party, the Front National, the UMP and the Ecology-Green Parties. Note that the Socialists won the greatest percentage of votes, and that the UMP and the FN are very close, some say almost neck to neck.