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‘A real shift’?: Le Pen’s French far-right party claims big city in local elections

Marine Le Pen's National Rally claimed victory in the southern city of Perpignan, in the first far-right takeover of a French city of more than 100,000 inhabitants since 1995. But the news was not all good for the far-right.

Published: 29 June 2020 08:52 CEST
Updated: 29 June 2020 10:12 CEST
'A real shift'?: Le Pen's French far-right party claims big city in local elections
Marine Le Pen with Louis Aliot, the newly-elected mayor of Perpignan. AFP

“It's not just a symbolic victory, it's a real shift,” Marine Le Pen told French TV channel TF1 just after the announcement that her party-colleague Louis Aliot would be the next major of Perpignan.

The southern city of 120,000 inhabitants, which is ranked France's 30th biggest city, was until this weekend ruled by the right-wing party Les Républicains.

The far-right party's takeover would be a chance to “show our capability of leading large administrative collectives,” Le Pen said.

 

 

Sunday's local elections in France were marked by record-low turnout, an unprecedented number of cities taken over by the Green Party, and a failure of President Emmanuel Macron's ruling party to make any significant impact. 

Macron expressed his concern over the high abstention rate, estimated at about 60 percent, and acknowledged that the elections were marked by a “green wave”, the presidency said.

With just 22 months to the next presidential election, Le Pen is viewed by political analysts as President Emmanuel Macron's main contender, and her party hailed their victory in Perpignan as proof that things were moving in the right direction.

READ MORE: French local elections: Greens achieve major gains while Macron's party slumps

However the overall results were disappointing for the Rassemblement National (RN, formerly Front National) compared to the last municipal elections in France.

The RN managed to keep the power in eight of the 10 municipalities they had won six years ago, but lost in Mantes-la-Ville in the Yvelines département (the only municipality they held in the Paris region) and Luc in the Var département.

They also lost around 40 percent of their local elected officials. In 2014 the party won 1,438 municipal seats in 463 communes. This year, they won 840 seats in 258 communes.

ANALYSIS: Cut the hysteria, Le Pen is not on her way to French presidency

The RN did claim victory in a handful new municipalities, including three small-towns in the Vaucluse département (Morières-les-Avignon, Bédarrides et Mazan).

Except for Perpignan, the party's most significant victories were in four in towns in the north and four in the south. 

In the north, the party won Bruay-la-Buissière, Henin-Beaumont, Villiers-Cotterês and Hayanges. Their southern claims included three cities around the Cote-d'Azur area (Le Pontet, Beaucaire and Fréjus), Perpignan and, further east, Moissac.

Several other towns were also won by candidates that were supported by the far-right party, but ran as independent. In Beziers, Robert Ménard, an close ally of the RN, was re-elected by 65 percent of the electorate.

Emeric Bréhier, Director of the Political Observatory at the Jean Jaurès Foundation, said the RN's victory in Perpignan was mostly “symbolic.”

“It's certainly an important victory, but it's not to be interpreted (as a sign of what will happen) on a national level in the future,” he told LCI, adding that he did not believe in an “RN wave” in the upcoming presidential elections of 2022.

Bruno Cautres, a French political analyst from the research centre Cevipof says the big challenge for Le Pen's party will be next year's regional elections.

“If they manage to win one or two regions in 2021, it could be a big boost for Marine Le Pen towards the presidential elections,” he told France Info.

Member comments

  1. In today’s article on the RN’s performance in the municipal elections, you include a link to an analysis. But the analysis is in fact from 2019. Is this an error? Or is there a genuine analysis of the RN performance this time somewhere on the site?

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: Macron’s attempts to tame world leaders shows he’s more a thinker than a diplomat

French President Emmanuel Macron's flawed efforts to charm the world's autocratic and populist leaders have previously ended in failure or even humiliation. Taking the Chinese president to the Pyrenees won't change that record, writes John Lichfield.

Published: 7 May 2024 12:06 CEST
OPINION: Macron's attempts to tame world leaders shows he's more a thinker than a diplomat

Emmanuel Macron used to fancy himself as a lion-tamer.

There wasn’t a murderous dictator or mendacious populist that the French President would not try to charm: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayip Erdogan, Victor Orban.

The results, overall, have been poor. Sometimes Macron has been eaten, diplomatically-speaking. Years of trying to smooth-talk Vladimir Putin – with invitations to Versailles and the presidential retreat at Fort Brégancon and the long-table talks in the Kremlin – ended in disillusion and humiliation.

Macron’s attempts to create a blokeish friendship with Boris Johnson ended in cross-Channel exchanges of insults and accusations. His mission to find a core, reasonable Donald Trump ended in the discovery that there was no reasonable Donald Trump, just a self-obsessed, shallow deal-maker or deal-breaker.

And now President Xi Jinping of China. The two presidents and their wives are on an away-day to the French Pyrenees (Tuesday), visiting a region dear to Macron since his childhood.

The first day of Xi’s French state visit in Paris yesterday seems to have produced very little. The Chinese president promised to send no arms to Russia but that is a long-standing promise that he has, technically-speaking, kept.

Xi is reported to have promised to restrict sales to Moscow of “secondary materials” which can be used to make arms. We will see.

The Chinese leader also agreed to support Macron’s call for an “Olympic truce” in Ukraine and elsewhere for the duration of the Paris games in late July and August. Good luck with that.

On the gathering menace of a trade war between the EU and China, no progress was made. As a minimal concession to his French hosts, Xi promised to drop threatened dumping duties on French Cognac and Armagnac sales to China.

Otherwise, Xi said that he could not see a problem. Cheap Chinese-built electric cars and solar panels and steel are swamping the EU market? All the better for the European fight against inflation and global warming.

READ MORE: How ‘Battery Valley’ is changing northern France

Maybe more will be achieved in shirt-sleeves in the Pyrenees today. The Chinese leadership is said to approve of Macron or at least believe that he is useful to them.

Beijing likes the French President’s arguments, renewed in a speech last month, that the EU should become a “strategic” commercial and military power in its own right and not a “vassal” of the United States. The Chinese leadership evidently has no fear of the EU becoming a rival power. It sees Macron’s ideas for a “Europe puissance” as a useful way of dividing the West and weakening the strength of Washington, the dollar and “western values”.

Macron has sometimes encouraged this way of thinking, perhaps accidentally. After his state visit to China last year, he gave a rambling media interview in which he seemed to say that the EU had no interest in being “followers of the US” or defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. He had to amend his words later.

That was Macron at his worst, an ad-lib, stand-up diplomat who ignores advice from the professionals in the Quai d’Orsay. I would argue, however, that the wider Macron argument – the EU must become more powerful or die – is the French President at his best.

Few other politicians in the world think ahead so much as Macron does. Democratic politics is mired in short-termism. Only autocrats like Xi or Putin can afford to think in terms of decades or centuries.

Macron likes to look around corners. He is often a better thinker than he is a diplomat or practical, daily politician.

His core argument – made in his Sorbonne speech last month and an interview with The Economist – is that Europe faces an unprecedented triple threat to its values, its security and its future prosperity.  

The rise of intolerant populist-nationalism threatens the values and institutions implanted in Europe after World War Two. The aggression of Russia and the detachment of the US (not just Donald Trump) threatens Europe’s security. The abandonment of global rules on fair trade – by Joe Biden’s US as well as Xi’s China – threatens to destroy European industry and sources of prosperity.

READ MORE: OPINION – Macron must earn the role of ’21st-century Churchill’

Civilisations, like people, are mortal, Macron says. Unless the EU and the wider democratic Europe (yes, you post-Brexit Britain) address these problems there is a danger that European civilisation (not just the EU experiment) could die.

Exaggerated? Maybe. But the problems are all real. Macron’s solutions are a powerful European defence alliance within Nato and targeted European protectionism and investment for the industries of the future.

The chances of those things being agreed by in time to make a difference are non-existent to small. In France, as elsewhere, these big “strategic” questions scarcely figure in popular concerns in the European election campaign.

Emmanuel Macron has now been president for seven years. His remaining three years in office will be something between disjointed and paralysed.

It is too early to write his political obituary but the Xi visit and the Sorbonne speech offer the likely main components. Macron will, I fear, be remembered as a visionary thinker and flawed diplomat/politician.

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