French poll result - National Front misses target

ONE-IN-FOUR of French voters in Sunday’s first round of local elections endorsed Marine Le Pen’s far right National Front. 

Polls suggested the anti-immigrant, anti-euro and stridently nationalist party would get at least 30% of the vote, a considerable advance on the party’s 25% high-water mark in the 2014 European elections.

The NF, sanitised and made to seem less intolerable and intolerant than it was under her father by Ms Le Pen, was roundly beaten by former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative UMP and their allies.

It is not surprising that a country with a somnolent economy, an unemployment rate of over 10% — 3.5m of 66m citizens claim out-of-work benefits — extremely restrictive employment regulations and an ever-growing number of immigrants would be a fertile ground for the NF.

The French determination to sustain its welfare system’s largesse, even though it is economically unsustainable, feeds into the NF’s growing popularity too.

Voters reacted to the more established parties’ inability to offer plausible solutions to ever more pressing social and economic challenges by voting for the NF — but maybe not to the extent that had been anticipated.

This may be a foretaste of what we might expect when we go to the polls but parties of the Irish centre would be foolish to depend on such a reprieve — but the French vote suggests one may be possible.

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