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French voters went to the polls Sunday in regional elections that could give Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National a taste of power ahead of next year’s national elections, when it is expected to be the main challenger to incumbent President Emmanuel Macron.
Opinion polls suggested that RN would take the lead in six of France’s 13 European regions in the first round of voting, although trade in horses between parties before the second round on June 27 would likely exclude the party from the power throughout the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.
Even so, success on the French Riviera in the second round, if it is achieved with RN candidate Thierry Mariani, it would be the first time the anti-immigration party would win a French region.
“This Sunday, you will have the historic opportunity to create the change of government that the country needs so much,” Le Pen said. he said on Twitter after campaign meetings throughout France.
With the left weakened and the center-right now divided between traditional Republicans and Macron supporters, Le Pen can have a good result in the final results, even if RN’s participation in the overall vote in the first round is not higher than the 28% achieved in 2015.
Mujtaba Rahman, European managing director of the Eurasian consulting group, said Le Pen’s regional victory would be “a significant event in French political history, the first time the far right has controlled anything larger than a city of size average since the end of the Nazi-sympathetic Vichy regime in 1944 ”.
Running a region like Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, with more than 4 million inhabitants and big cities like Marseille and Nice, would give Le Pen “unprecedented opportunities for the presence of problems and problems in the next ten months before the first round of the presidential election ”- and sounded a warning that Le Pen’s victory over Macron in 2022 was no longer inconceivable, he said.
The regional and departmental councils for which the French vote have limited powers, especially in transport and schools, and turnout is expected to be low despite the importance of voting as an indicator of national political trends.
The Ipsos voting group predicts that turnout would only reach 41%. “The French have their minds on other things completely,” Brice Teinturier of Ipsos told a webinar last week. “We are coming out of the pandemic. . . and the prospects for the economy are much better. ”
But low turnout and polls are likely to show voters are more concerned about crime, immigration and unemployment that Covid-19 will help Le Pen leave its mark.
“Abstention helps those polling stations that are the most motivated, that is, usually the extremes,” François Bayrou, Macron’s ally and leader of the MoDem party, told LCI television.
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