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Far Right Wins a Local Election in France Minor Victory by Far-Right Party Has France Asking if Bigger Changes Are Ahead
(about 11 hours later)
PARIS — The far right National Front won a decisive victory in a local election in southeast France on Sunday, underlining how the party’s tough talk on crime and illegal immigration is resonating with voters and dealing a blow to President François Hollande’s governing Socialist Party. PARIS — The triumph by the far-right National Front party in a minor election in the south of France has created headlines across the country and prompted politicians and political analysts to take a hard look at the landscape, a little more than a year after the election of a socialist president, François Hollande.
According to the final results, the National Front candidate, Laurent Lopez, won 53.9 percent of the vote in Brignoles, a town near the Mediterranean port of Toulon, compared with 46.1 percent for Catherine Delzers, the candidate of the center-right Union for a Popular Movement, or U.M.P. The Socialists backed a Communist ally who failed to make it to the runoff. Even an eventual plea to leftist voters to support the U.M.P. failed to fend off a Front victory. The decisive victory on Sunday in Brignoles, a small city in the Var district, by the National Front candidate appeared to be more of a defeat for the two more centrist parties — the Socialists led by Mr. Hollande and the conservative Union for a Popular Movement party, or UMP — than a reflection of deepening support for the far right, analysts said.
“This vote shows that the French have a wish for change, that we bring solutions for the questions the French are asking,” Marine Le Pen, the National Front’s leader, said on LCI television on Sunday. Still, the National Front was energized by the victory, and the party’s leader, Marine Le Pen, said it was preparing candidates to compete in many of the elections that will be held next spring.
Analysts said the vote, while in a relatively minor election, nevertheless represented a slap to Mr. Hollande and showed the potential for the National Front, rather than the U.M.P., to benefit from anger over the government’s immigration and economic policies. Municipal elections in France are to be held in March, followed by European Parliament elections in May. “This vote shows that the French have a wish for change, that we bring solutions for the questions the French are asking,” Ms. Le Pen said on television.
The Front’s victory underscored the challenge Mr. Hollande’s government faces from both the right and the left. There is disquiet on the left as Mr. Hollande faces the need to overhaul a large and expensive public sector while meeting the European Union’s expectations of fiscal restraint. He is under pressure from his core voters, who want him to preserve the generous social benefits that the Socialist Party has long supported. Mr. Hollande said that the best way to respond to Sunday’s results was to demonstrate that his socialist policies were working. “The only answer is to obtain results on jobs, on growth, on security and on solidarity,” he said while on an official visit to South Africa. “It is an obligation for us to obtain results.”
Writing in the center-right newspaper Le Figaro on Monday, Guillaume Tabard, a political commentator, said the Front’s strong showing in the election was a sign that it was no longer just attracting protest voters but was becoming “normalized” as a mainstream party. Political analysts were cautious about the impact of the vote.
Recent polls show Mr. Hollande with the lowest approval rating of any French president in 20 years, amid stubborn unemployment hovering around 10 percent and a general feeling that his leadership lacks decisiveness. While Mr. Hollande won praise for his intervention in Mali to stop the advance of Islamist rebels, he was recently left isolated in his support for American military action in Syria when Britain and Germany opposed it. President Obama later reversed course and agreed to a Russian-brokered plan for Damascus to destroy its chemical weapons stockpiles. The ballot was a special election for one of the general counselors in Var, a district in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. France is made up of regions that are subdivided into districts and cities.
Meanwhile, Ms. Le Pen has been seeking to give the Front an image makeover by distancing the party from the persistent perception among some French that it is racist and anti-Semitic. This month, she vowed to take legal action against anyone who characterized the party as “extreme right.” Brignoles, with about 20,000 registered voters, has significant unemployment, and the National Front has enjoyed a strong showing in several nearby cities in the last two decades. So its success in this race came as no great surprise, politicians and analysts said.
But attempts to recast the party have faced resistance. An editorial in Le Monde this month argued that the Front’s rejection of French republican ideals of equality, its stigmatization of Muslim immigrants and its rebuke of the European Union made it a reactionary party. “The National Front is, today as yesterday, a movement of the extreme right,” it said. “This is not the discovery of America,” said Pascal Perrineau, director of the Center for Political Research at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris.
Still, the result and a recent poll suggest that Ms. Le Pen, who has been trying to move the party away from its image as racist and anti-Semitic and focus more on anti-crime and anti-immigration themes, may be gaining a wider following.
In a poll conducted this month by the French Institute of Public Opinion for Le Nouvel Observateur, a weekly magazine, 24 percent of respondents said they would vote for the National Front in the European elections, more than any other party. Those elections will be held next May.
The National Front’s share of the vote in national elections has been growing, but is still far below the Socialists and the UMP. In the 2012 presidential elections the National Front took just under 18 percent of the vote in the first round, an increase from 2007 when it won 10.4 percent.
In the Brignoles election, the National Front won by a far larger percentage, but tellingly with almost the same number of votes — 2,728 — that it had received in the last two elections. The difference was that socialist and conservative voters did not bother to cast ballots.
Over all, only a third of registered voters voted.
The reason for the abstentions, said Jean-Yves Camus, a political analyst, is that “the left is doing poorly at mobilizing its voters, who can’t understand the government’s policies, and they are not yet seeing the effects of those policies.”
“There’s a sort of wait-and-see attitude as well as disappointment” on the part of left-leaning voters, he said.
Mr. Camus also said the conservatives were not expressing a clear message.
In Brignoles, that meant that barely 7,000 people voted in the first round. In the second round, the only candidates still in the race were from the conservative UMP party and the National Front, and so few left-leaning voters turned out.
Looking more broadly, Mr. Perrineau said, the outcome mirrors the politics of the far right across Europe and the way the movement has benefited from the vaguely articulated positions of more centrist parties.
“These are people who are the losers in modernization,” said Mr. Perrineau, referring to manufacturing workers made jobless by relocations overseas and demands for more technical skills.
“And there’s a rising feeling of, at best, Euro-skepticism and, at worst, Euro-phobia,” he said, referring to doubts about the promised benefits from the European Union’s economic integration.
“We’re getting closer to the European elections,” Mr. Perrineau said, “and we can see better how those forces can capitalize better than others on this kind of sentiment in Europe.”

Maïa de la Baume contributed reporting