France entered a new political era on Monday as the far-Right Front National (FN) positioned itself as the country's main opposition and the traditional Right dissolved into infighting, reports The Telegraph.
After game-changing regional elections in which the FN hit a historic high, Nicolas Sarkozy immediately called a politburo meeting of his conservative party, The Republicans, and fired his number two, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, with whom he had clashed over electoral strategy.
“We need a new team," said Mr Sarkozy after The Republicans, the conservative party he runs, won seven regions, while François Hollande’s ruling Socialists took five. The nationalist candidate came first in Corsica.
Tactical voting kept the FN from winning a single region – a setback for the far-Right party following its strong showing in the first round, in which it came top in six out of 13 regions and took the largest chunk of the national vote.
Four million more French people took to the urns in round two to keep the FN out, with turnout at almost 60 per cent.
Despite this, the FN still has the wind in its sails after smashing its previous record in a national election and increasing its score in round two. The far-Right won 6.8 million votes on Sunday. That is almost 400,000 more than Marine Le Pen, the party leader, garnered in the 2012 presidential elections despite a far lower turnout this time.
It may have no regions, but the FN now commands an army of regional councillors, tripling the number it won around the country and turning it into an opposition force to be reckoned with.
“We have elected officials across France, it’s unprecedented,” said Florian Philippot, FN vice president.
Ms Le Pen can now play the victim card, arguing that parties of “the system” are ganging up on her. On Sunday night, she denounced a “campaign of calumnies and defamation decided in the gilded palaces of the Republic”. It is a line she will repeat in the run-up to the presidential election in 2017.
Mr Sarkozy’s party, meanwhile, had little cause for celebration; despite clinching seven regions, an almost miraculous outcome given their first round score, The Republicans came out weakened from the election, in which the historic dam between the mainstream and far-Right looked decidedly porous.