Far right gets shut out in French polls

Le Pen's camp denied any seat after rivals struck arrangement in key region

Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally, or RN, failed to win any seat in the second round of French regional elections on Sunday after several other parties joined hands to thwart her party's influence in the country.

The RN candidate Thierry Mariani had a razor-thin lead after the first round of elections on June 20 in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur region, raising the far-right party's hopes for a breakthrough. But he was defeated by Les Republicains candidate Renaud Muselier in the second round thanks to the fact that left-wing candidates pulled out of the region's election to help Muselier's campaign.

Exit polls showed Muselier winning 56.6 percent of the vote against Mariani's 43.4 percent.

"Tonight we have chosen the fate of a free region," Muselier said in a tweet.

Despite the appeals by many politicians across the parties, the voter turnout in the second round was extremely low, at about 34 percent, only slightly better than in the first round.

After the Sunday election, Le Pen took aim at the rival parties for their "unnatural alliances" to "prevent us from showing that we can run a region".

She said that the local democracy was suffering a "profound crisis", adding that the high abstention rate showed a "discontentment" among electors that was a "major signal for all the political class and society".

It is the first election since the country's electoral map was redrawn in 2016 when its 22 regions were reduced to 13.

The main winners on Sunday are the traditional mainstream left Socialist Party and its left-wing allies and the center-right Les Republicains. They have been largely absent from the French national political landscape since French President Emmanuel Macron's centrist La Republique en Marche, or LREM, party won the 2017 presidential election.

Xavier Bertrand, regarded as a strong contender for next year's presidential election, won the northern battleground region of Hauts-de-France, where Le Pen received 43 percent of the vote six years ago.

"The far right has been stopped in its tracks and we have pushed it back sharply," Bertrand, a former government minister, told reporters after the election. "This result gives me the strength to seek the nation's vote."

Setback for Macron

Macron's young LREM party also suffered badly by failing to win any seat in the regional elections, a reflection that years in national power have not translated into grassroots support.

LREM candidates won just 11 percent of the vote in the first round and about 7 percent in the second round, below the 10 percent threshold. The poor performance made Macron unable to vote for his own party on Sunday when he cast his ballot in the northern resort of Le Touquet.

"What is going wrong that so much reporting focused on Le Pen. To the extent that outside France we hardly know anything about the Republicans," Holger Hestermeyer, a professor of international and EU law at King's College London, said in a tweet on Sunday night, clearly referring to the fact that several polls before the elections predicted Le Pen's party would win in several regions.

In the regions that the LREM contested in the second round, its candidates finished in third or fourth position, "a snub for the presidential movement which still does not manage to establish itself locally" 10 months ahead of the presidential election, commented French daily Le Monde.

Agencies and Xinhua contributed to this story.