French far right wins record votes in polls

Paris: For the second time in 18 months Marine Le Pen and her Front National have won a national poll in France, increasing her share of the vote in the first round of Sunday’s regional elections compared with last year’s European parliament ballot.

In a year bracketed in France by the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terrorist atrocities, Le Pen has benefited from the national mood of fear and anger and the craving for security. But her triumph is no flash in the pan to be ascribed to jihadism. Regardless of how her party fares in the second round of voting this coming Sunday, Le Pen is here to stay. She has transformed the politics of the Fifth Republic from a binary contest of the left versus Gaullism into a trickier and less stable three-party system.

To call Sunday’s far-right victory in France a wake-up call for Europe’s leaders borders on the meaningless. Through crisis after crisis since 2008 there have been too many wake-up calls to mention.

Europe’s traditional elites of the centre-right and centre-left just keep sleepwalking into the next disaster. It may be coming soon in the form of David Cameron’s gamble on whether Britain stays in the EU.

On Sunday evening Le Pen was quick to claim that the Front National was now France’s political party number one. She is not alone. Next door in Belgium, Bart de Wever, the mayor of Antwerp and leader of the Flemish nationalist, voiced satisfaction with the outcome.