France’s far-right topped the country’s first round of legislative elections on Sunday for the first time, with the National Rally, the party of Marine Le Pen, winning about one-third of the vote.
Finishing second was the left-wing coalition, New Popular Front (NFP), with 27.99% of the vote. Third was French President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling Ensemble, or “Together,” coalition with 20.76%.
The vote was a rebuke to Macron, who called the snap General Assembly elections after his party suffered a heavy defeat to National Rally in European Parliament elections on June 6-9.
The vote solidified the fact that National Rally, once considered a fringe party, has moved to the mainstream. Voters, when queried by press, frequently expressed the view that while they once found the party scary, they now no longer do.
A pre-election study by the Ipsos polling institute of a representative sample of 10,000 registered voters found that National Rally voters had “grown and diversified,” The New York Times reported.
While still strongest among the blue-collar working-class, the study found National Rally’s electoral base had “considerably widened,” improving its vote by 15 to 20 percentage points among retirees, women, the under-35 age group, high earners and big-city residents.
It signifies how far National Rally has come from when it was known as National Front and headed by Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was convicted of Holocaust denial. His daughter expelled him from the party in 2015.
She then raised her protégé, Jordan Bardella, 28, charismatic and telegenic, to president of the party.
“Marine Le Pen’s smartest move was to appoint Bardella as number two if not as co-leader,” Michel Gurfinkiel, a French author, journalist and public intellectual, told JNS.
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Author: Ruth King
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