The far-right National Rally (RN) party of Marine Le Pen won a resounding victory in the first round of the polls Sunday, with 33.15 percent of the votes cast for members of the National Assembly. The anti-immigration party made large gains in the southeastern Provence Alpes Cote d’Azur region but failed to make a breakthrough in Paris.
The far-right National Rally (RN) made historic gains in the first round of France's two-stage parliamentary election this weekend.
The party of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella topped the poll with 33.15 percent of the votes cast for members of the National Assembly, according to preliminary results published by the interior ministry.
The leftwing New Popular Front alliance was in second place with 28.14 percent, ahead of President Emmanuel Macron's centrists on 20.76 percent.
The RN is hoping to win an outright majority in the second and final round of voting to be held on July 7 in the 501 out of 577 constituencies where no candidate won outright on Sunday.
Here are some key figures on the RN's vote:
39 MPs already elected
Thirty-nine National Rally candidates have already been elected to parliament after winning over 50 percent of first-round votes -- a tour de force by a movement that never before managed to win a parliamentary seat in the first round of voting of a two-stage election before.
They include the party's longtime leader Marine Le Pen and party vice-president Sebastien Chenu.
Best scores in northern rust belt
The RN increased its share of the vote in each of France's 577 constituencies bar one -- the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia, where it won just 4.6 percent of the vote.
The anti-immigration party performed strongest in the northern Hauts-de-France region, a depressed former industrial region that used to vote Communist or Socialist but has swung massively to the far-right over the past decade.
Seventeen RN candidates won seats at the first round in the region, an historic performance.
One of the big winners was longtime RN leader Le Pen, who pioneered its winning strategy of tacking to the left on the economy while continuing to take a hardline stance on immigration and crime.
She was re-elected with 58.04 percent of the seats in the former coal mining bastion of Pas-de-Calais.
Among the losers was Communist Party leader, Fabien Roussel, who lost his seat to an RN candidate in a constituency that had been held by the Communists for over 60 years.
Biggest gains in southeast
The area where the party most increased its share of the vote over 2022 was in the southeastern Provence Alpes Cote d'Azur region, which includes the cities of Marseille and Nice, as well as the resorts of Cannes and Saint-Tropez.
The region is an historic stronghold of the National Front, the forerunner of the RN, which was founded by Le Pen's ex-paratrooper father Jean-Marie in 1972 to harness nostalgia for France's colonial past.
An MP from the mainstream right-wing Republicans party, who backed a controversial pact with the RN that split ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy's party, won election in the city of Nice in a constituency where the RN grew its score by 24 points over 2022.
In Marseille, France's second-biggest city, the vote was split three ways in most constituencies between the RN, the left and the centre, with the RN leading in half.
But the city centre went to the hard-left France Unbowed with the party's coordinator, Manuel Bompard, winning by a landslide (67.49 percent).
Spurned by Parisians
The French capital, a leftist bastion, has historically proved a tough nut for the far-right to crack and Sunday's results showed it still failing to make a breakthrough.
The party's worst scores were in Paris, where all its candidates were eliminated in the first round.
Nine of the 18 seats up for grabs in Paris were won by the leftwing New Popular Front in the first round and Macron's centrists were leading in five others.
(AFP)
