Why
the National Front (thinks it) won in France
Marine
Le Pen lost a regional election she never wanted to fight, but her
real goal is in 2017.
By NICHOLAS VINOCUR
12/15/15, 5:30 AM CET
PARIS — For Marine
Le Pen and her allies, the National Front’s failure to win a single
region in local elections Sunday is a bump on the road toward her
real political objective: reaching the second round of a presidential
battle in 2017.
A day after its poll
defeat, the far-right party has rushed to gloss over some of the
election’s seriously chastening aspects. The final tally proved not
only that Le Pen was unable to rally a simple majority in any of
France’s 13 regions, but also that tactical voting by her opponents
was highly effective in stopping her candidates from climbing the
final rung to regional power.
The mainstream
parties are breathing easier, reassured by the notion that the French
are still not ready to trust the National Front with the business of
governing the country, or even any of its regions.
But Le Pen’s
electoral strategists will be looking at different signals, and
finding plenty of encouragement. The main one is the National Front’s
total vote tally in the election’s second round — which, at
nearly 7 million, represents a clear increase not just on its
first-round score, but also on its previous high water mark, in the
2012 presidential election.
The progression in
total vote share will be seen as crediting the party’s main
strategic moves over the past year, which include ousting former
party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and trying to widen the party’s
appeal as much as possible to pull in disappointed left- and
right-wing voters.
The ‘real’
result
While rivals see the
final result as proof that voters see the National Front as unfit for
executive office, its officials counter by pointing to steady
progress in that department, too.
The FN currently
counts in its ranks 11 town mayors, two senators, two National
Assembly deputies, 72 departmental councillors and, after Sunday’s
vote, 358 regional councillors — triple the number it had before.
The proliferation of mid-level officials in government institutions
lacks the glamor of a regional presidency, but it means more voting
power and more FN officials whose salaries are paid from taxes, as
opposed to party coffers.
The party will also
draw strength from its powerful showing in the election’s first
round, when it won a bigger share of the vote than any other party.
Already, candidates and officials are pointing to the December 6
result as the “real” barometer of the country’s mood, before
the tactics of the FN’s rivals supposedly skewed the repartition of
votes by helping to prop up candidates who were weak on their own.
If the party can
maintain its momentum, Le Pen will be on course to slide into the
second round of a 2017 presidential election, only to lose to a
mainstream rival.
The dynamic we have
created allows us to work toward 2017 with serenity — Nicolas Bay
“The dynamic we
have created allows us to work toward 2017 with serenity,” said
Nicolas Bay, a senior National Front official and the party’s main
electoral strategist. “We are still progressing in spectacular
fashion.”
For the next few
months, the National Front is likely to double down on its criticism
of elite France and the two mainstream parties, which it says are two
sides of the same coin.
Vice President
Florian Philippot, who lost a three-way race in eastern France,
argued that Sunday’s result confirmed a split between “patriots”
in the FN and globalizers in President François Hollande’s
Socialists and Nicolas Sarkozy’s Les Républicains.
In the southern
Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, losing candidate Marion
Maréchal-Le Pen pressed that logic far enough to call her opponents’
victory a defeat.
“In the name of
the Republic’s values, they sabotaged democracy,” said
Maréchal-Le Pen, the niece of the party’s president. “A victory
by ganging up 10-on-1 is nothing more than a defeat.”
Relieved of the
obligation to campaign on complex regional issues, the National Front
will now focus all of its energy on 2017, reassured on its basic
political strategy.
Winning the
presidency has been Le Pen’s goal ever since she took over the
party from her father in 2011 — so much so that she was deeply
reluctant at first to run for election in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais
region, fearing that the campaign would drain her and that a victory
would stretch her too thin between duties as an MEP and party
president.
It was only after
much urging by her entourage that Le Pen finally agreed to run, based
on the logic that she could not afford to look like a bystander
during the race.
Even once
campaigning had started, Le Pen made fewer visits to the area than
her main rival, Xavier Bertrand, and spent a great deal of her time
traveling to support other candidates around the country. When she
did campaign in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, her bid was a hybrid of local and
national proposals, with an emphasis on the latter.
Over the next 18
months, Le Pen will intensify her attacks on France’s ruling
establishment, the collusion between mainstream right- and left-wing
parties, and the failures of both sides to bring about any
improvement on the employment front or prevent terrorist attacks.
She will keep
attacking the EU while pounding away on what she once called
“bacterial” migration, which she says is depriving French people
of social resources.
As Europe’s focus
turns to Britain’s demands to renegotiate its relationship with the
EU, Le Pen is likely to draw strength from any public debate about
the bloc’s flaws and failings. She has already modeled her own
platform after the Brexit roadmap of British Prime Minister David
Cameron, vowing to call for a referendum on France’s membership in
the eurozone six months after her election as president.
But Le Pen must also
face a major challenge, perhaps her toughest yet: widening the FN’s
appeal enough that she could win 50.1 percent of the vote. That was a
long shot before Sunday’s vote, and it remains one today.
Some of the party’s
campaign proposals, namely its offer to withdraw from the eurozone,
are still a turn-off for mainstream voters. Pensioners and
higher-earning voters, two groups without which Le Pen cannot win an
election, are particularly put off by the notion of seeing their life
savings diluted by an abrupt passage from the euro to a devalued
French franc.
“They have
gathered as many votes as they can among French people who are
suffering, who are dissatisfied with the government and hate the
‘system,'” said Aymeric Chauprade, a one-time foreign affairs
adviser to Le Pen who left the party in November. “But they need to
get from from 30 to 50 percent of the vote, and that is going to be
the hardest part by far.”
Said Chauprade, “I
don’t think they have the means, currently, to do it.”
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