France’s Front National has made yet another important electoral breakthrough, this time in a region traditionally the stamping ground of the far left, when it polled 46.24 percent of the vote in the Villeneuve-sur-Lot by-election held over the past weekend.
The election, caused by the resignation of Jérôme Cahuzac, the millionaire Socialist ex-budget minister who admitted this year that he had kept illegal, tax-evading bank accounts in Switzerland and Singapore for 20 years, was won by a conservative the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) candidate with 53.76 percent of the vote.
The outcome of the election—in a seat which has always been safe Socialist party territory—has been widely interpreted to be a good indicator of the growth of the FN and also an indication of the outcome of European Parliamentary elections due next year.
The European parliamentary elections are run on a proportional representation basis, unlike French parliamentary elections which are run on a first-past-the-post system (the French electoral system was changed precisely to stop the FN gaining representation in parliament), and if the results are replicated, the FN will emerge as France’s second biggest party.
In the first round of the by-election last Sunday, the local Socialist was eliminated. The first-round poll was topped narrowly (28.7 percent) by the UMP candidate. Second place was taken (26.04 percent) by the FN candidate, while the Socialist Party candidate took 23.69 percent. The French election rules are that a winning candidate must have more than 50 percent of the vote, and hence the election went into a second round, with only the top two candidates taking part.
From that result, it is clear that a large number of UMP voters and Socialists switched to the FN, resulting in a nearly doubling of the FN vote total. It is this trend—of young disaffected left wingers switching to the FN, which the establishment finds most troubling.
According to French media coverage, the young FN candidate Etienne Bousquet-Cassagne said in his reaction that it was a “a defeat which foretastes victory. We have moved significantly against all the other (parties) which is a good omen for the coming elections,” said the 23-year-old.
After the results came in, he received a phone call of congratulations from the president of his party, Marine Le Pen, who was crying with emotion.
According to the French newspaper Le Monde, the “glass ceiling which the FN was supposed to hit, which would prevent it from being a party in a second-round election by majority vote, is now flying apart.
“This by-election takes place three months after that in Oise which saw the FN candidate overcome the 50 percent majority vote hurdle,” the Le Monde coverage said.