Marine Le Pen’s National Front may come out as a big winner in the coming French regional elections.
It is likely that Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN) will arise as France’s first political force at the regional elections on December 6 and 13. According to an OpinionWay poll for Metronews and LCI, FN may garner 30 % of the vote, ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative party, Les Républicains (LR), currently at 28 %, and of president François Hollande’s socialist party (PS), which lags at 22 %. Similar figures were to be found in a TNS Sofres/One Point poll for Le Figaro, RTL and LCI : the National Front would get 29 %, Les Républicains 27 %, and the socialists 22 %.
Clearly, current concerns about jihadist terror attacks, the fate of Middle Eastern Christians and the migrants crisis are boosting FN as the national identity party. And Marine Le Pen’s efforts to distance herself from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen and to turn FN into a bona fide democratic party seem to be paying off. When president Hollande decreed a state of emergency in the wake of the November 13 massacres in Paris, Marine Le Pen refrained from criticism or overbid, as her father would have done and as she herself did last January, and granted a full support.
Smaller parties are also on the map, and they may help either LR or PS to overcome FN. The neocommunist Left Front and the Greens may provide the socialists with 10 to 15 more points, thus bringing them to about 35 %. Likewise, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan’s small souverainist party, which stands in between FN and LR, may get 4 to 5 %. On the other hand, the electoral law is rather a boon to FN : regional elections are based on a two ballots proportional representation, with a bonus for the winning list. If Le Pen does a strong showing on the first ballot, she may attract many conservative or absentee votes on the second ballot (one half of the voters favor abstention so far).
Regional power is now an important factor in France, especially under last year’s reform which reduced the former twenty regions to thirteen only. Control of one or several regions (possibly the North and Provence-Côte d’Azur) would definitely enhance Le Pen’s stature in national politics.
© Michel Gurfinkiel & The Jewish Chronicle, 2015