Above: Tuesday’s edition of Le Monde. On the front page, the headline on top says, “Severe defeat for [Marine Le Pen’s] RN party and [Emmanuel Macron’s] LRM party on massive abstention.”
The maps show the election results at the regional and départementale levels. (Note: in France, red is the color of the Left and blue is the color of the Right.)
The takeaways from Sunday’s regional elections:
Turnout was low.
Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party was severely beaten in all regions and départements, including its Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur stronghold in the southeast, where they had taken the lead in Round 1. In the end, the center-right Les Républicains party won convincingly there with 57% of the vote.
President Macron’s centrist LRM party and its allies also suffered a major blow, failing to win in any regions or départements and pulling in only 7% of the vote nationwide.
The big winners were the Socialists and Les Républicains, the traditional center-left and center-right parties who were declared all but dead after the 2017 presidential election.
Socialists allied with the Greens and others on the Left held on to the five regions where they won in 2015, gathering 34.7% of the vote nationwide.
The center-right Les Républicains and their allies took seven regions and 64 départements with 38.6% of the vote. The winners in three regions, Xavier Bertrand in the northern Hauts-de-France, Valérie Pécresse in the Paris metro area Île-de-France and Laurent Wauquiez in the eastern Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes are expected to compete against each other for their party’s 2022 presidential nomination. Given Les Républicains’ strong vote totals on Sunday, one of them could go on to become the next President of France.
On the front page of Monday’s edition of Libération: the headline says. “The RN flunks out.”