Above: Tuesday’s edition of Le Monde reports record low voter turnout in the regional elections held Sunday.
Round 1 of the French regional elections was held on Sunday. The elections are widely seen as a bellwether for the 2022 presidential elections and the results indicate that voters are disenchanted with both parties led by the two front runners.
Polls predicted that Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) would carry five or six of the country’s 13 regions but they carried only one, their stronghold in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. However, even there, the results were a disappointment for them, four points behind their 2015 number. Nationwide they took slightly under 19% of the vote compared to 28% in 2015.
The picture for President Macron’s La République en Marche party was equally as grim. They failed to take 1st place in any region and, running on united tickets with other Centrists, they ran behind the RN with 17.7% of the vote.
Le Monde’s big front-page story focused on the election’s low turnout, 33.3% which the paper says is a record since the beginning of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
So who were the winners?
The Center-Right Les Républicains led in six regions, notably blocking the RN in its second stronghold, the northern region of Hauts-de-France. Xavier Bertrand, in the lead there, is hoping that a Round 2 win will help him launch a 2022 presidential campaign, if Les Républicains nominate him.
With similar hopes in Île-de-France (the Greater Paris metro region), Round 1 winner Valérie Pécresse is expected to compete against Bertrand for a 2022 Les Républicains presidential nomination.
Running on their own ticket or with other Center-Right allies, Les Républicains had the election’s best performance compared to the other parties with about 23% of the vote.
The Left, as splintered as always, still managed to lead in five regions with Socialist candidates in four of them and with a united Left/Greens ticket In Occitane. The Left still has the largest bloc of votes with 37.9% slightly ahead of the 37.7% they gathered in 2015. However, there’s a lot of movement within the bloc as voters migrate away from the old Leftist parties toward the Greens who surged by 12 points over their weak showing in 2015.
Like Le Monde, Libération summed it all up in their front page headline; “The French drop out.”