What France’s regional election results mean for Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen

Emmanuel Macron is facing a fresh threat to his hopes of winning a second term in the Elysee Palace, following a surge in support for France’s traditional conservative parties in regional elections yesterday.

The result also delivered a blow to far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who is widely viewed as Macron’s biggest rival for the top job.

Both Macron’s centrist La Republique En Marche (LREM) party Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) failed to win any regions in the local votes, boosting “the aspirations of centre-right leaders determined to prevent next year’s presidential election becoming a two-horse race”, The Times reports.

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Humbled front-runners

Le Pen had hoped to take Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in a first regional victory for RN, but that ambition was thwarted by an alliance of rival parties in a so-called “republican front” to keep the far-right from office. Instead, the region was won by the Republicans, after left-wing candidates withdrew from the race.

The last regional elections were held in 2015, a year before Macron founded LREM. But despite his high hopes when voters went to the polls yesterday, LREM also “obtained none of France’s 13 metropolitan councils, in a further sign of its failure to put down local roots”, says The Times.

By contrast, the Republicans and the Socialist Party “both received surprise boosts in polls that favoured the incumbents but drew a meagre turnout of under 35%”, the BBC reports.

According to exit polls, Macron’s party polled at just 7% nationwide - a result that experts believe “could shift the balance between political heavyweights vying for a position in the 2022 presidential race”, Deutsche Welle (DW) reports.

Le Pen’s party also got a relatively disappointing 20% of the vote, while the candidates of mainstream conservative parties retained their seats in all regions.

The “mainstream Right” won 38.1% of ballots nationally, “giving its candidates a boost before the presidential vote in April 2022”, says The Telegraph. Left-leaning and green parties also surpassed expectations, with 34.8% of the vote.

Le Pen yesterday accused rival parties of forming “unnatural alliances” to block RN from power, telling her supporters that they “did all they could to keep us out and prevent us from showing the French our capacity to lead a regional administration”.

Meanwhile, Stanislas Guerini, an MP in Macron’s governing LREM, said that while he “rejoiced” in Le Pen’s inability to win a foothold, the LREM also had “work to do” ahead of the presidential election.

Marching on

The Hauts-de-France region, near Calais in the north, was also earmarked as a potential gain for Le Pen’s RN, but was won instead by incumbent conservative Xavier Bertrand. After polls closed, he told supporters: “The far-right has been stopped in its tracks and we have pushed it back sharply.”

Bertrand is now emerging “as the conservatives’ favourite in opinion polls to become the party's face in the presidential election”, DW reports.

As well as quashing Le Pen’s hopes of victory in Hauts-de-France, “Macron’s aides see Bertrand as a threat to the president’s centre-right voter base”, according to the broadcaster.

The results have also raised “questions over the accuracy of polls predicting that next year’s presidential election will be a repeat of 2017”, says The Time. Indeed, the outcome signals “a renaissance for regional politicians once dismissed by Macron as belonging to an ‘old world’ on the verge of extinction”.

The paper’s Paris correspondent Charles Bremner attributes the “thrashing” taken by the president’s party in Sunday’s vote to “the failure of La Republique en Marche to establish itself beyond its existence as a Macron vehicle”.

But “it is premature to see the emergence of Bertrand, a down-to-earth one-time insurance executive, as Macron’s main threat”, adds Bremner, who notes that the Republicans are still “squabbling over who should run” while the LREM boss has plenty of time to “recalibrate and broaden his appeal”.

For Le Pen, the key problem is that while she has “succeeded in pushing political debates to the right”, she has repeatedly “failed to deliver results at the polls”, says The Telegraph.

Picking up one region would have been a “been a first and a boost for her presidential bid”, says BBC Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield. But her “voters stayed away from the polls” in a “big disappointment for the hard-right”.

On the other hand, the low turnout across the board may further complicate the picture ahead of the presidential vote. Despite “appeals by politicians and the prime minister, Jean Castex, for voters to turn out”, almost two-thirds “shunned the polling stations”, The Guardian reports.

Political analysts argue that the likely reason for “the lack of interest in the regional elections” is that the French electorate has “become focused on the presidential election”, says the paper. And that suggests yesterday’s results may not be replicated come next April.