Marine Le Pen. Demotix/Francois Pauletto. All rights reserved.As with every recent election, France woke up this morning shocked and groggy. The Front National is front page material, somewhat of a theme recently. Right-wing Le Figaro and communist L’Humanité share the same title: ‘Le Choc’.
With 27.96% of the vote, Marine Le Pen’s party has come top nationally, leading by a larger margin than predicted by polls. The centre right Union de la droite (Les Républicains, the MoDem and UDI) came in second with 26.89%, while the Parti Socialiste collapsed to 23.33%. This is a terrible result for the centre left who had won in all but one region in continental France in the previous two elections in 2004 and 2010.
Yet can we still call such results a shock in light of the past three years? In 2012, Marine Le Pen received 17.9% of the vote in the presidential elections. Later that year, the party received 13.6% in the legislative elections against the odds set by a majoritarian system which had successfully kept the FN out of the National Assembly since 1988. In 2014, the party won in the European elections with 24.86% of the vote. Finally, in March this year, the FN came third in the departmental elections with 25.24% of the vote in the first round.
