France: Far right surges in local elections

France’s far right is becoming a nationwide force, said Helmut Wyrwich in the Tageblatt (Luxembourg). The xenophobic National Front (FN) party, led by Marine Le Pen, had its best showing ever in local elections across France, winning 10 mayoralties and hundreds of local seats, and control of 16 city councils. It’s all part of a canny strategy to focus on the grassroots. Whereas Le Pen’s father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, concentrated “only on presidential elections,” Marine is bringing the party to the people, cementing it in local politics. It helps that she avoids her father’s extreme, racist rhetoric. Her kinder, gentler far-right politics have a pragmatic appeal at a local level—unemployed French voters seem to like her plan to give jobs to the native-born first, rather than immigrants.

Don’t attribute the FN’s gains to a sudden lurch rightward among the electorate, said Joseph Bamat in France24.com. It’s not that the FN is more popular, but rather that the other parties have changed tactics. The Republican Front, a “decades-old unwritten agreement” between right- and left-wing parties to keep the National Front out of power, “appears to have come to an end.” Under the pact, in a runoff between, for example, a Socialist and an FN candidate, Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) voters are supposed to hold their noses and choose the Socialist. But this time, center-right UMP leaders said they would give their followers no such instruction. The new slogan was “neither FN nor Socialist.”

That’s not the whole story, said Le Monde (France) in an editorial. The collapse of the Republican Front may have contributed to FN gains, but “the key lies” in the failure of the left. The Socialists were supposed to be honorable, yet one of President François Hollande’s ministers stood before the country and lied brazenly about a secret foreign bank account. They were supposed to care for the workers, yet after two years in government they have been “powerless to stem the economic and social crisis that undermines the country” and fuels the FN’s rise.

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The left is demoralized, said Philippe Marlière in The Guardian (U.K.). In the second round, if their candidate of choice wasn’t in the runoff, leftist voters simply stayed home. The fault lies with Hollande, who is now seen “as the president of the rich,” because he is a Socialist who cuts income taxes on the wealthy while raising the value-added tax that hits everyone. He has stuck to “failed austerity policies” even as unemployment and public debt soar. No wonder voters are depressed.

Those who chose the FN may find themselves similarly disillusioned, said Birgit Holzer in the Aachener Zeitung (Germany). Remember what happened last time the FN won a few mayorships, in the mid-1990s? The new mayors overestimated the xenophobia of their towns—one of them even renamed a street named after Nelson Mandela—and were soon booted from office. The question this time is whether the FN can offer “a credible policy that will give people hope.”