It was a brutal setback. Despite an election campaign that was dominated by law and order issues and after months of public debate on themes favouring the far right, Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, performed poorly in the first round of France's regional elections on Sunday 20th June 2021. It topped the voting in just one French region, Provence-Alpes Côte d’Azur (PACA) in the south. Yet in the first round of the same elections in 2015 it led in six regions: PACA, Hauts-de-France, Grand Est, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Centre-Val de Loire and Occitanie.
In their one success, PACA, the far right candidate Thierry Mariani came ahead of his right-wing rival Renaud Muselier, but the lead was small: 36.3% against 31.9%. This narrow margin seriously undermines the far right's chances of winning in the decisive run-off vote on Sunday June 27th. The performance by Mariani, formerly of the right-wing Les Républicains (LR) and a former minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy, was well below that of Marion Maréchal in 2015. On that occasion the list headed by Marine Le Pen's niece picked up 40.5% of the votes, far ahead of the 26% achieved by the LR's Christian Estrosi at the time.
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And in the Hauts-de-France region in the north the performance of the RN's Sébastien Chenu was almost humiliating for a man who is both a local MP and his party's national spokesperson. He picked up just 24% of support, almost 20 percentage points behind the current conservative president of the region and former government minister Xavier Bertrand. In particular Chenu's score was nearly fifteen percentage points below Marine Le Pen in 2015 when the party leader harvested 40.6% of the votes. Though the candidate has criss-crossed the region for months in his 'Chenu-bus', many voters on the ground said they simply did not know who he was.
In the southern region of Occitanie the magistrate Jean-Paul Garraud, another defector from the LR, finished neck and neck with the sitting Socialist Party (PS) president Carole Delga, getting 34% of the vote. But he seems unlikely to be able to pick up many more votes in Sunday's second round, especially as the LR candidate Aurélien Pradié, who picked up 10% of the votes, largely based his campaign on the need to fight against the far-right RN.
Over in the east of the country the far right's Julien Odoul only managed 23.7% in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, after a campaign marked by scandals, notably comments he made about the suicide of farmers. This put him behind the sitting PS president Marie-Guite Dufay and almost ten points below the score achieved by the RN's Sophie Montel in 2015 who had come top in the first round with 31.48 % .
The young RN candidate in the Centre-Val de Loire region, Aleksandar Nikolic, picked up 21.7 % of the vote share, some four points behind the PS's François Bonneau who managed 25%. Again, the RN candidate did less well than his 2015 predecessor who had polled 30%.
In the Grand Est, where the RN has a strong presence on the ground, the former journalist for TV5 Monde Laurent Jacobelli only won 20% of the vote share, ten points behind the sitting LR president of the region Jean Rottner who polled 30.5%. That was a fall of close to 15 points compared with the performance of the 2015 far-right candidate Florian Philippot, who had come top in the first round then with 36.5%.
Further to the south, the RN's Andréa Kotarac managed to attract just 12% of the electorate in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, where the sitting LR president Laurent Wauquiez picked up 42.7% of the votes after a hard-line right-wing campaign.
“Our voters didn't turn out,” said a clearly-disappointed RN president Marine Le Pen in a brief speech in which she called on her party's supporters to come out in force next Sunday. “The abstentions give a misleading view of the political forces on the ground,” she said. “Having suffered months of restrictions of freedom, I call on your to free up your ideas and put right the results of the first round,” she told her supporters.
“One young person in two was not aware that there was an election,” said the RN's vice-president and rising star Jordan Bardella, who also did a little less well in the Paris region that his predecessor in 2015. But he took some comfort from the dismal performance of the ruling La République en Marche (LREM) party. “The party in government recorded one of the worst results of any party in government,” he told France 2 television.
Marine Le Pen and her team had become increasingly worried in recent weeks about the lack of enthusiasm among RN supporters and she claimed that the government had “chosen abstention” by – she suggested - deliberately communicating very little with the public over the election.
Historian Nicolas Lebourg, a specialist on the far right, said its poor results could in part be explained by the fact that the RN does not have a strong presence on the ground in many areas. “The RN has elected representatives in just 0.8% of communes. And since 2015 it has lost 28% of its regional councillors, who have left during their term of office. Yet what counts in local elections are local representatives,” he said.
“When there is a high rate of abstentions we know that those who still do turn out are the over-65s and the better-off, in other words not those who traditionally vote for the RN. Yet it is to them that Marine Le Pen directed her whole campaign in recent months. And that's clearly been a failure,” he said.
By adjusting her economic policies Marine Le Pen had in fact been trying to pick up the electorate who had supported the right-wing candidate at the last presidential election, former prime minister François Fillon. She believed that after his defeat – and subsequent conviction over a fake jobs scandal affair involving his wife Penelope – Fillon's supporters had been left politically homeless. She also chose to campaign hard in the regions which the Right had also targeted, a decision that seems to have achieved little.
However, Nicolas Lebourg said it was hard to draw too many conclusions for next year's presidential election on the basis of such a low voter turn-out in the first round of the regional poll.
“The RN remains a strong party for the presidential elections or the one-round European elections,” he said. “That said, the gap between the figures given by the polling companies in recent days and the results achieved on Sunday raises the question of a possible speculative bubble around the RN. For a long time we know that support for the FN [editor's note, the RN's former name was the Front National] was underestimated, perhaps today it's overestimated.”
A record level of abstentions
It is the big winner in this election, write Mathilde Goanec and Ellen Salvi. And it prevents any conclusive analysis about the relative strengths of the parties involved in it. The abstention rate in this first round of the regional and département or county elections achieved a new record; some 67.2% of registered voters did not turn out. That compares with around 50% in the same elections in 2015.
This record low turnout can be viewed as a punishment meted out by registered voters on politicians. For weeks the latter had tried to pursue issues that had little to do with this election, in particular law and order. The regions do not have any powers in this domain but that did not stop many of the candidates from making it their priority. The debates were dictated solely by the agenda of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), against whom President Emmanuel Macron portrays himself as the only viable alternative ahead of the 2022 presidential campaign.
Before the first round voting President Macron had told his ministers: “I will draw no national conclusion from what are local elections.” Perhaps that is understandable after the performance of his own ruling La République en Marche which did not even manage second place in any region. It may have been hoping to be a power broker in the second round of voting next Sunday but in fact it has been left unable to form any alliances ahead of that final vote, an unprecedented position for a party of government in France.
This level of voter apathy is unprecedented in any election in France since 2000 when a referendum to cut the length of presidential terms of office from seven to five years attracted just 30% of voters. The low turnout was near-universal across France. The picture was bleakest in the Grand Est region where 70.39 % of voters stayed away from the ballot box, followed by the Pays de la Loire on 68.98 %, and the regions of Centre-Val de Loire, Hauts-de-France and Normandie, where around 67% of the electorate stayed at home. The only region to buck this trend was Corsica where the abstention rate was 'only' 57.08 % and where Gilles Simeoni, who supports greater autonomy for the island region, came top with 29.19 % of the vote.
An example of the widespread malaise is Brittany in the west of the country, a region where there is a strong local identity among voters and yet where turnout fell by 16 points between the last regional elections in 2015 and 2021. “It's enormous,” said Patrick Lehingue, professor of political science at the University of Picardy, who is nonetheless not surprised. “If you look at the last eleven elections, seven had a turnout that was below 50%, so we are seeing a worsening trend.”
This level of turnout can no longer be dismissed as due to transient factors such as the weather, and points more to a form of 'civic strike' by voters. Among those who have shunned the voting booths, many were people who always used to vote regularly but who have become weary of the way politics is conducted.
Factors such as a break in the link between administrative boundaries and the places where people live and spend their time, a lack of identity with sometimes vast regions and a growing mistrust of politicians have all contributed to this disastrous level of turnout. And it comes against a backdrop of the Covid health crisis. “We had the same setup with the municipal elections [editor's note, held in 2020] but at least in your commune you know the candidates,” said Patrick Lehingue. “In this case the political landscape was hard to decipher.”
One striking feature of the voter apathy is that one of its main victims was Rassemblement National, which failed to get its vote out. “You can read it in two ways, politically or sociologically: yes, it's the unhappiest voters who turn out in mid-term elections,” said Patrick Lehingue. “But in addition it's the youngest voters and the working classes who are more likely to abstain, so as a matter of course that does not favour Rassemblement National.” Moreover, voters on the mainstream Right, who tend to be older, are more likely to turn out to vote.
Across the political spectrum politicians were quick to warn about the low level of turnout on Sunday. “Wake-up call”, “collapse” and “catastrophe” were some of the words used to describe it. “How long can democracy survive without the people?” asked the member of Parliament for the radical left La France Insoumise ('Unbowed France'), François Ruffin, on Twitter. The national secretary of the green Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV) party, Julien Bayrou, said: “The abstention rate is high, the far right are still too high, that's the outcome of this election night.”
Hugues Renson, vice-president of the ruling LREM at the National Assembly, said that “when two out of three voters don't go out and vote in an election it's not from lack of interest or fear of a virus, it's a political act in itself, and one that certainly shouldn't be downplayed.” The government's official spokesperson Gabriel Attal said on Sunday night: “No one can break out the champagne tonight, the huge abstention rate should raise questions for all of us.” And interior minister Gérald Darmanin described the turnout as “particularly worrying”.
One of the biggest losers of the night was undoubtedly Emmanuel Macron's ruling LREM party whose largest share of the vote was in the Centre-Val de Loire region, where minister Marc Fesneau's list won 16.65% of the vote – and came fourth. In the Hauts-de-France region the LREM fielded no fewer than five government ministers and ended up with just 9.14% of the overall vote.
Yet rather than change policies to combat the high abstention rate, the ruling party was quick to look for other solutions. The LREM president of the legislative committee at the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, told Europe 1 radio some of her proposals for boosting voter turnout. They included holding the presidential and Parliamentary elections on the same day, and also to bring together the regional, département and municipal elections. “A simplification and clarification of democratic life,” was her comment. Scrapping elections to avoid abstentions is certainly simpler; but not exactly more democratic.
The Right prospers and avoids the Macron trap
The conservative Right, spearheaded by Les Républicains (LR), is the political movement with most to smile about after Sunday's vote, and they look set to hold on to all seven regions that they currently hold, writes Ilyes Ramdani. Indeed, even in their wildest dreams the Right could not have imagined such an outcome. According to provisional results the traditional Right attracted 28.7% of the national vote in the first round and did well in just about every region.
There was certainly a great deal at stake in these elections for LR. They have been in huge difficulty in the polls at a national level, yet of the seven sitting right-wing presidents, six of them came top of the ballot in Sunday's voting. The only exception was in the south in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) where current regional president Renaud Muselier came second on 31.2 %. But he was only just behind his main rival, Thierry Mariani from the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) who got 36,4 %, and Muselier looks well placed to win in the second round next Sunday.
This means the Right looks set to hold onto the regional stronghold that it built up in 2015 against a then all-powerful Left. “This evening is an acknowledgement of our work,” the LR's president Christian Jacob said. “We are by a long way the party that got the most votes.”
One year ahead of the presidential elections these results will also boost the main potential right-wing candidates for that contest. Xavier Bertrand with 41.4 % of the vote in Hauts-de-France, Valérie Pécresse on 35.9 % in the Paris region and Laurent Wauquiez who polled 43,8 % in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes all easily came top in their regions, far ahead of the RN or the Left.
The only one of these to have openly declared as a presidential candidate for 2022 is Xavier Bertrand and his performance on Sunday will come as a major boost. It will reinforce his stance, built up over months, as the best bulwark against the far right. “The RN is in retreat here because we showed through work, commitment and consistency that politics wasn't dead,” said Bertrand after the results were announced. Later in the evening Valérie Pécresse followed in his footsteps. “I've forced the the far right into retreat through my convictions and values,” she said.
Though none of these three former ministers under Nicolas Sarkozy has yet won their contests, their good scores on Sunday put them in a strong position for Sunday. It means they will not be trapped into having to do a deal with Emmanuel Macron's LREM for the second round, as the ruling party had hoped would be the case. In the Hauts-de-France government minister Laurent Pietraszewski, whose LREM list was eliminated after getting just 8.5% of the vote, has already called on his voters to support Xavier Bertrand on Sunday.
The Left down but not out
The results of the first round have produced some paradoxical lessons for the Left, writes Pauline Graulle. It showed its structural weakness against a strong and well entrenched Right. But it also showed that the path to victory exists in some regions if the correct alliances are made ahead of the second round.
The Socialist Party vote held on in the five regions it still controls and the party should be able to win them all next Sunday. It is well ahead in Occitanie in the south and Nouvelle-Aquitaine in the south-west where Alain Rousset is seeking a fifth term. It is also in the lead to a lesser extent in Brittany, Centre-Val de Loire and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté.
“People held on to what they know, the Left is standing firm,” said a contented Stéphane Le Foll, mayor of Le Mans in western central France. A year ahead of the presidential election the Left has an issue over leadership. Soon after Sunday's results became clear some in the party, such as Luc Carvounas, mayor of Alfortville in the south-eastern suburbs of Paris, were quick to argued that as the “leading political force on the Left” the PS had a “responsibility to bring together the social-ecologist bloc for 2022”, referring to a united front of greens and socialists.
That is the optimistic view. But overall at national level the PS saw its share of the vote fall by seven points in relation to 2015, going from 23.5% in the first round then to 15.8% on Sunday. It only came top among other Left groups in those regions where it was already in power.
Another disappointment for the PS was in the hugely symbolic Paris region where the list headed by Audrey Pulvar and backed by the socialist mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo – a possible candidate for the presidency next year – got only around 11% of the vote. Pulvar was just ahead of her rival from the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI), Clémentine Autain, but behind Julien Bayou, national secretary of the green Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV), whose list picked up 14 % of the vote.
What happens in this region next Sunday will be followed closely. “In the Paris region the Left [editor's note, the PS, LFI and communists] will easily coalesce around Julien Bayou in the second round,” the EELV spokesperson Alain Coulombel told Mediapart. “Valérie Pécresse [editor's note, the sitting regional president from the Right] is on 34% and us too: with a great unity list it's doable, if there's a three-way contest,” he added. What he did not point out was that in 2015 the entire Left had six more percentage points than 2021 in the Paris regional vote and still lost. “It's now down to us to create a surprise between now and Sunday,” said Julien Bayrou, who unlike in the first round can now run a campaign that has some hope of winning.
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English version by Michael Streeter