The French Socialist party has narrowly beaten the far-right Front National in a parliamentary byelection in rural eastern France – the country’s first electoral test since January’s terrorist attacks, reports The Guardian.
The Left’s win in the parliamentary seat in the Doubs, a rural-industrial area on the Swiss border, partly reflects the socialist president François Hollande’s newfound popularity since the terrorist attacks; in all other by-elections since Hollande came to power, the socialists have been routed as voters sought to punish the beleaguered president.
But the real symbolism of the Doubs result was the very high vote for Marine Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigration Front National, which showed the fragility of Hollande’s much-vaunted “spirit of January” in which the president had hoped the French nation was more solidly united after the bloody attacks that began with a murderous raid on the magazine Charlie Hebdo and ended in bloodshed at a kosher supermarket in Paris.
The Front National’s candidate, the MEP Sophie Montel, who once talked about the “obvious inequality of the races” and campaigned in the Doubs with leaflets warning of the “Islamist peril”, came close to winning the seat, showing how the party’s support in rural areas has soared. Frédéric Barbier, the socialist candidate, won by 51.43% of the vote to the FN’s 48.57%.
“I’m not rejoicing, I am not boasting,” Barbier told his supporters, calling on the post-attacks “spirit of national unity” to continue.
The FN’s high score in the Doubs will shake the French political class and set the tone for next month’s local elections across France, in which the far right is hoping to take scores of seats and the traditional political parties are scrambling to try to contain them against a backdrop of stubbornly high unemployment and stagnant economic growth.