The extreme-right National Front party, led by 81-year-old Jean Marie Le Pen – convicted several times in the past for racism and anti-Semitism – won almost 12 percent of the votes in Sunday’s polls. The victory means that Le Pen’s party has qualified for a second round at the polls on March 21, where National Front will be an option on the ballot in 12 out of 22 regions.
Le Pen’s daughter, 41-year-old Marine, won 18.31 percent of the vote in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, home to a low-income population. Pundits speculated that Marine would become her father’s successor as leader of the party.
The extreme-right movement had been in a state of decline for the past several years, winning only 4.29 percent of the vote in the 2007 legislative elections, and 6.8 percent of the vote in the 2009 European polls. However, as the senior Le Pen told TF1 television on Sunday, the party “has shown it is still a force to be reckoned with in France.”
President Nicolas Sarkozy had been attempting to woo Le Pen’s supporters away through public debates on the nature of French identity, but analysts said he may have inadvertently done the opposite instead. Both Sarkozy and Le Pen have been battling the trend towards radical Islamization of the Muslim population in France, currently some six million strong and rising. Sarkozy’s party has been advocating for a French ban on wearing the burka – a full-length, all-encompassing Islamic facial veil.
Le Pen’s party has battled open immigration and has focused on the “threat of Islam” in French society. A recent National Front poster showed France covered by an Algerian flag and a forest of minarets (towers belonging to mosques), with a slogan that read, “No to Islamism.” The poster resembled one that was produced by an extreme-right party in Switzerland prior to a referendum on whether to allow the construction of mosques in the country last November. Swiss voters approved the ban.
The National Front poster caused a diplomatic brouhaha and prompted the Algerian government to lodge a formal complaint with the French government.
Sarkozy’s center-right UMP party, which won only 26 percent of the vote, was a major victim of voter apathy, according to the polling group CSA. The leftist French Socialist party (PS) was the big winner in Sunday’s polls, with nearly 30 percent of the votes.
Some 53.65 of voters didn’t bother to go to the polls at all.