Far-right fails in elections, French politicians relieved

PARIS

Conservatives and Socialists breathed a sigh of relief as the far-right National Front failed to claim a single in the second round of regional elections on Sunday.

The opposition center-right led by ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative party, Les Republicains, won seven of mainland France's 13 regions, including the key battleground of Ile-de-France, which includes Paris, for the first time since 1998.

The ruling Socialists of French President Francois Hollande and its allies limited their losses from the first round and managed to hold on to five regions.

The anti-Europe, anti-immigration, National Front (FN), who claimed historic results in the first round, failed to win a single region.

The party's leader Marine Le Pen was beaten by the conservatives in the north, and likewise her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen in the south.

Les Republicains' Xavier Bertrand, Le Pen's opponent in the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, thanked left-wing voters who helped him beat the FN leader.

After the first round results, the Socialist Party chose to pull out its candidates from certain regions in order not to split the anti-FN vote in the second round and urged left-wing voters to rally behind mainstream conservative candidates in a bid to block the National Front.

However, Sarkozy decided his party would not withdraw or go into any "tactical alliances".

Prominent conservative Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet criticized Sarkozy's strategy on Sunday, saying: "If voters had applied the ni/ni (neither/nor) rule, we would have lost [against Le Pen and her niece]".

Alain Juppe, one of Sarkozy's biggest rivals among conservatives in the bid for the presidency in 2017, said the FN's defeat was "a sign of good health for our democracy".

Speaking after the results, Prime Minister Manuel Valls hailed the far-right's defeat but warned that there should be "no relief, no triumphalism", following the far right's results in the first round.

"The danger of the far-right has not been removed, far from it," he said.

Socialist Party chief Jean-Christophe Cambadelis said "these results are a success without joy".

He called on France’s left to work together, and to look to the cooperation seen during Paris’s historic COP21 climate accord as an example.

Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen spun a positive spin on her defeat, claiming that nothing could stop her party's momentum as it won a historically high number of votes (6.6 million).

She said her party was "the first opposition force in many regional councils of France", adding Sunday's results would not stop the "inexorable rise, election after election, of a national movement".

The first round of the regional elections saw the National Front leading in six out of 13 regions, increasing its share of the national vote to 28, percent from 11 percent in similar elections in 2010.

This is the first regional election since a reform that reduced the number of regions in mainland France from 22 to 13.

Turnout figures were around 10 percentage points higher than for the first round of the elections, with a 58.6 percent voter turnout, according to the Interior Ministry.