Graffiti on poster in France of Marine Le Pen. Andy Hay/Flickr. Some rights reserved.How can regional elections be so traumatic in one of the world’s longest established democracies? How can we be so enthralled by a vote to select the local representatives of assemblies who are only in charge of local issues like schools, roads and social care? How can we focus so much on our local politics the very day after the ecological momentum created in Paris on 12 December by the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21). A conference where, for the first time in history, all nations involved decided to unanimously fight global warming? Is it because we, the French, are always so prone to navel gazing and dramatising everything linked with politics, our national sport?
The fact is that these elections – for 13 large regions to replace the smaller 21 metropolitan ones, plus the overseas ones – have been branded by all sides as a victory for themselves and a defeat for the others. The extreme right National Front (FN) was unable to carry a single region but has reached an unprecedented score of 6.8 million votes (27% of the total), allowing it to claim a “victorious defeat”. They now have representatives in all regions and a springboard for their leader, Marine Le Pen, to reach the second round of the May 2017 presidential elections and face either the Left or the Right candidate.
President François Hollande's Socialist Party (PS) and its leftist and Green allies have clung to 31% in a “joyless success” by keeping five regions and helping the Right to crush the FN in three others by withdrawing their candidates in what they call a “Republican Front”; for the last six years they had controlled all but one metropolitan region.
