On Monday, however, Lisieux was paying tribute to a secular heroine whose blue-eyed stare was equally hard to avoid. From the campaign posters, newspapers and magazines ranged in the station kiosks and newsagents, the smiling – now triumphant – face of Marine Le Pen was everywhere.
"A full-frontal shock" declared the local newspaper, alluding to Le Pen's election victory in her European constituency in north-west France. "Le Pen at 25%: the shock", headlined the best-selling regional newspaper Ouest-France.
It was the first time the Front National (FN) had overtaken all the traditional parties in a national vote, coming top with a quarter of the ballots. The centre-right opposition UMP won 20%, and the ruling Socialists were in third place with 14%.
Although the opinion polls had been predicting that Le Pen's far-right Front National party could win by this much, the scale of the victory still came as a bombshell to the French press and political class. In Lisieux the FN did not even field a candidate in the 2009 European elections, when the "extreme right" candidate polled just over 2%. This time round the FN scored 27.5%.
"I don't know why everyone is so surprised; they've been telling us for weeks the FN would win," said Lisieux resident Anne.
"Yes I voted FN. Like a lot of people I'm fed up with the other parties and I think they have some good ideas," said the retired administrator, lowering her voice.
A self-employed businessman agreed. "I didn't vote FN because I didn't vote, but I can understand why people did," he said.
Like many FN sympathisers, both cited immigration, crime, delinquency and the vague and undefined sense that France is going to the dogs as concerns that had boosted support for the far right.
And like many FN sympathisers both refused to give their full names. Le Pen may claim she has "de-demonised" the party and her victory in Sunday's European ballot shows that in the secrecy of the polling booth she is right, but FN voters remain reluctant to publicly stand up and be counted.
"I won't tell my daughter I voted FN," Anne added. "She's a Parisienne, she wouldn't understand." The "bleu Marine" wave that washed over France, giving the FN one quarter of the vote, spared only the French capital and the west of France.
"But Paris is not France and France is not Paris," added the businessman, echoing the oft-repeated complaint from the provinces.
From the country's northern border with Belgium and the Channel ports of Calais and Boulogne, down through France's depressed former industrial heartlands, past the Normandy beaches, scene of the Allied D-Day landings 70 years ago next week, the voters shunned the advice from their Paris-based leaders and turned the political landscape navy blue. As the final scores came in the FN had tripled its 2009 vote in the region.
In Paris the prime minister, Manuel Valls, ruled out any policy change as the mainstream parties reeled from the results.
Valls, speaking on RTL radio before heading to the Elysée palace for an emergency mini-cabinet meeting, said President François Hollande and the Socialist government had been elected for a five-year term with a specific "roadmap". "I'm not going to change this roadmap," he said, referring to tax cuts which the government hopes will pave the way for economic recovery.
As the results became clear on Sunday evening, a sober-looking Valls went on television to acknowledge that an "earthquake" had shaken the country, and recommitted himself to restoring jobs and growth in response.
Hollande, in a televised speech to the nation last night, said the result was "painful" and an embarrassment for France, the "founding nation of the European Union, homeland of human rights, country of freedom".
He also suggested that the EU should curb some of its powers, saying: "Europe must be simple, clear, to be effective where it is needed and to pull back where it is not needed."
France "cannot pursue its destiny by turning in on itself, closing itself off, rejecting the other", he said.
The Socialists' dismal showing prompted questions about Hollande's legitimacy at a time when his personal approval rating has sunk to unprecedented lows. Le Figaro said in an editorial: "Institutions of course allow François Hollande to carry on, but the question is: can he still govern?"
Former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said: "Can the president of the Republic, with this level of unpopularity and such a disavowal, be able to turn things around?"
Several papers compared the party's defeat to the shock result of the presidential election in April 2002, in which Lionel Jospin was eliminated in the first round of voting after winning fewer votes than FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Addressing jubilant supporters, Le Pen demanded the dissolution of parliament based on her party's results which, she said, enshrined the FN as "the first party of France".
The French "no longer want to be led by those outside our borders, by EU commissioners and unelected technocrats. They want to be protected from globalisation and take back the reins of their destiny," she said.
The Socialists were not the only party to be submerged by the FN tidal wave. The opposition centre-right UMP was also struggling to explain the debacle in which it trailed behind the FN.
UMP leader Jean-François Copé, who faces a growing leadership challenge, said that he had felt a "huge rage" across France during the election campaign. "This country isn't working, there is huge rage. We need to understand that," he said on BFMTV.
He urged Hollande to take a political initiative "to change policy". But others in the party turned their guns on Copé himself.
Voting analysis of Sunday's polling shows that the FN can now claim a national presence, including in western France which had previously resisted its xenophobic and anti-European message. Its support came from young people and from the working class.
And in eastern France, where the FN has traditionally done well, the party made big gains, notching up 29% of the vote in Alsace where the former mayor of Strasbourg, Socialist Catherine Trautmann, lost her seat in the European parliament. In the south-east, Jean-Marie Le Pen's list won 28%.
But there were a few places that resisted Marine Le Pen's charms, including the historic city of Caen built by William the Conqueror and destroyed in the second world war. Considered politically centrist, moderate and outward-looking - the city is twinned with Pernik in Bulgaria, Nashville in Tennessee, Alexandria in Virginia and Stevens Point in Wisconsin the the USA, Coventry and Portsmouth in the UK, Würzburg in Germany and Thiès in Senegal - Caen escaped the FN tsunami, giving the centre-right opposition UMP, the ruling Socialist party, and the Green party more votes.
Joël Bruneau, the UMP mayor of Caen, told journalists: "Today, unfortunately, there are a certain number of French people who think that leaving Europe will resolve part of our problems.
"But there are above all people who feel that nobody is taking any notice of their problems. For sure there are some people who support them (the FN)...but a vote of this kind is also a cry for help.
"It's no great surprise if those French who are suffering most turn towards the Front National."
Original Article
Source: theguardian.com/
Author: Kim Willsher in Normandy and Anne Penketh
No comments:
Post a Comment