France’s far-right National Front fails to retain first round performance in elections, loses

France’s far-right National Front (FN) remained unsuccessful in winning a single region in elections held on Sunday despite winning six out of 13 elections during the first round of elections held last week.

According to RFI, FN leader Marine Le Pen lost to the centre-right alliance Republicans representative Xavier Bertrand, with Le Pen gathering 42 percent votes against Bertrand’s 58 percent in the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie.

Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, 26, was also unsuccessful in keeping up with her last week’s first round performance and lost to Christian Estrosi in the Provence Alpes Cote d’Azur region with 45 percent to 55 percent votes.

On Dec. 6, FN led the first round of elections when French voted with anger over the struggling economy and threat created after deadly terrorist attacks in Paris that led to the loss of 130 innocent lives. But with the elections just a month after the Paris attacks, 58 percent of voters were found participating in the elections.

President Francois Hollande’s Socialists had pulled out their representatives from some of the regions before the second round of elections and asked their supporters to favour the former President Nicolas Sarkozy-led conservative Republicans. According to the exit polls, however, the Socialists’ Left and the Republicans’ Right have won in five regions each, with results of the remaining three still awaited.

After the poll results for the elections were revealed, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that the danger of FN is still sustained though it did not win the elections. “The danger of the far-right has not been removed. Far from it,” the ABC quoted him as saying.

The exit poll has indicated that Republicans will win most of the seats in the elections. Le Pen noted the defeat and vowed to keep fighting. She also blamed the mainstream parties joining forces to restrict FN from coming into power. She told her supporters that they had been “disenfranchised in the most indecent of ways by a campaign of lies and disinformation.”

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