France on Monday woke up to a “new political age” that appears to have sounded the death knell of two-party politics in the country when the far-right party Front National (FN) made surprising gains in municipal elections, reports The Telegraph.
Surpassing even the most upbeat forecasts by Marine Le Pen, the FN leader, the anti-EU and anti-immigration party gained at least 10 per cent of the vote in 229 towns across France, qualifying them to run in the second round of elections on March 30.
Although it only won five per cent of the vote nationally, the FN’s success was proportionally high as it only fielded candidates in less than 600 the some 37,000 villages, towns and cities in France.
The elections were widely seen as a slap in the face for François Hollande, who is suffering record unpopularity against a backdrop of near-zero growth and high unemployment.
“The FN can now boast to be the third major force in national politics alongside the Socialists and the 'Republican’ Right,” wrote Le Monde newspaper in an editorial, saying the result reflected the “discredit from which [the president] is suffering”.
Meanwhile, the left-leaning Nouvel Observateur heralded a “new age of the extreme-Right”.
The anti-EU party capitalised on the lowest turnout ever in French municipal elections amid sweeping public disenchantment in mainstream politics.
In the former coal-mining town of Henin-Beaumont in northern France, FN candidate Steeve Briois achieved 50.3 per cent, an absolute majority which made him the outright winner and mayor.
Under municipal election rules in France, any candidate who gets more than 50 per cent is declared the winner without a need for a second round.
The FN hopes to claim the mayorship of up to 15 medium-sized towns after the second round, and if it achieves that, it will have beaten its previous record in 1997 when it had four mayors. It is set to win at least 1,000 municipal councillor posts.
The party took the lead in the southern towns of Béziers, Saint-Gilles, Fréjus, Perpignan and Avignon, where Olivier Py, the head of the town’s famous theatre festival, warned the event would fold under a far-Right mayor.
Read more of this report from The Telegraph.