François Hollande’s chances have improved, Nicolas Sarkozy earned breathing space but not much, and Marine Le Pen’s Front National is struggling in cities

In the end, the Front National did not take control of any of France’s regional governments, despite going into Sunday’s second round of voting having topped the first round in six of the country’s 12 mainland regions.

An 8.5-point increase in turnout compared with the first round, Socialist candidates withdrawing in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (where Marine Le Pen and her niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen represented the far-right’s best chances of victory) and tactical voting all contributed to keeping the FN out.

The Socialist party and its allies on the left held on to five regions, mostly in its historic strongholds. Although the left has lost 2.5m votes compared to 2010, when it won control of 21 of the then 22 metropolitan regional administrations, a bounty of five regions just a few weeks ago would have been seen as on the optimistic side of expectations.

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Les Républicains, led by Nicolas Sarkozy, won the most regions (seven) and votes (10.1m, a share of 40.2%). The result will provide breathing space for the former president, but not much.

Considering the Socialist party’s President François Hollande’s record low approval ratings, some will have expected Sarkozy’s party to be in a stronger position less than two years from a presidential election. Without Socialist candidates pulling out of two runoffs, the two main parties most probably would have ended up governing five regions each, with the FN winning two.

Front National held back in France – but its trajectory is on the up Read more

It should not come as a surprise that on Monday morning the former prime minister Alain Juppé, whom many regard as Sarkozy’s strongest challenger for the centre-right presidential candidacy, published a manifesto outlining his ideas for France.

Meanwhile, nationalists won control of Corsica’s government for the first time.



Monday morning’s headlines will be a disappointment for the FN. Le Pen’s party was hoping to win control of three regions, but went from six first-round leads to four second-place finishes in spite of a relatively unchanged share of the vote (from 27.7% to 27.1%).

However, the party’s trajectory is on the up: the FN won more than 6.8m votes, a record high and an 800,000 increase on the first round. In 2012’s presidential election, Marine Le Pen took 6.4m votes, but on a far higher turnout (79.5%) than on Sunday (58.4%).

The party has tripled its number of regional councillors, and it will have a presence on all regional councils (from having no presence at all in half the country). In four regions, it is the main opposition party. By contrast, in the 2010 regional elections the FN won 2.2m votes, an 11.5% share.

The presidential election is not due until the first half of 2017, but there are some important signals that we can draw from the regional balance of power:

Before the regional elections, few would have bet on Hollande’s chances in 2017. But the president, despite losing, is one of the election’s few winners and could style himself as the best contender against Le Pen in a presidential race. The right won nearly 3m votes more than the centre-left, but the figures excluding regions where the Socialists did not stand or urged tactical voting reveal a more balanced picture:



Sarkozy’s party now faces a complex primary race to determine who leads it into the election. The outcome of that contest is far from certain.



When French voters are faced with a binary choice over who to put in power between an FN candidate or one from the two main parties, the FN is distant from a majority. Marine Le Pen is unlikely to win the 2017 election based on the final-round regional results, but much rests on who stands as a candidate for the other parties.

The FN’s challenge is particularly evident in city centre areas. In all but two of France’s main cities, the party’s share of the vote was substantially lower than its regional average. In Lille, the difference was 20 points.



We know from Sunday’s outcome and the 2002 presidential election that Socialist voters will turn out to keep out the FN. However, one untested assumption is how a Républicains first-round vote would distribute in a runoff contest between a Socialist and an FN candidate. Sarkozy’s advice to centre-right voters going into the second round was to back neither the Socialists nor the FN. Had the Socialists taken the same approach, the FN most probably would have clinched two to three regions.

Although the Républicains line may well be different in a one-off Socialist versus far-right race, we do not have enough data to conclusively determine where the vote on the right would go. Based on polling, it is clear that any such a contest would be closer than one featuring Le Pen against a centre-right candidate – Sarkozy or otherwise.