Europe | France’s regional elections

Sarko wins

A departmental election victory strengthens Nicolas Sarkozy's case for another shot at the presidency

|PARIS

NICOLAS SARKOZY scored an important victory in France’s departmental elections on March 29th, strengthening his chances of running for the presidency again in 2017. The former French president’s centre-right party, the UMP, came top in the second round of voting for the country’s 100-odd departments, scooping up control of 67 of them. This is his first electoral success since taking over as party leader last November, and will help to silence those who feared that he was no longer a political winner.

Although Mr Sarkozy himself has never seemed to doubt his ability to make a successful political comeback, his first few months were underwhelming. He put forward little in the way of policy ideas, and struggled to unify a divided party, which had mixed feelings about his return to politics. Some polls suggested that he would be beaten by Alain Juppé, an ex-prime minister, in the party presidential primary, which is due to be held in 2016. After the sweeping electoral victory last night, however, Mr Sarkozy has emerged strengthened in the run-up to that contest.

Three other lessons from this election stand out. The first is the advantage of unity in a fragmented political system. Mr Sarkozy owes his victory in part to the decision by the UMP and two centrist parties, the UDI and MoDem, to stand together on party lists as a single centre-right block. This helped them come top in first-round voting on March 22nd, and thus to secure the momentum needed to carry the alliance through to victory in the run-off.

President François Hollande’s Socialist Party, by contrast, paid the price of division. It stood alone in most departments, pitting it in the first round against its erstwhile Green friends and those who stand even further to the left. After humiliatingly finishing in third place in first-round voting, the Socialists held on to just 34 departments in the run-off. Their crushing losses included symbolic departments such as Corrèze, which Mr Hollande once ran, and Essonne, which includes the town of Evry—where Manuel Valls, the prime minister, was once mayor. The result was, conceded Mr Valls, an “unquestionable” defeat.

A second lesson is that the enduring unpopularity of Mr Hollande puts the Socialists in a peculiarly tight spot for the remaining two years of his term. Before the terror attacks in Paris in January, he had become the most unpopular president in the country’s Fifth-Republic history. His statesmanlike handling of those events gave him a poll boost, but it did not last. Confidence in his ability to engineer prosperity remains weak. Despite signs of recovery in the euro zone, the French economy has yet to pick up and unemployment continues to rise.

More tricky still, Mr Valls’s unsteady control of his Socialist parliamentary majority forced him recently to push liberalising economic reforms through by decree, rather than risk defeat in a vote. A rowdy minority of left-wing party rebels, as well as most Greens and those outside the party on the left, are critical of the government for not sticking to the anti-market and anti-austerity promises that Mr Hollande made on the campaign trail in 2012. For them, this election defeat shows that the last thing the country needs is more liberalising reforms. How to square this circle, and unite the left in the run-up to 2017 while continuing with its reform programme, is the most pressing question facing Mr Hollande and Mr Valls.

The final lesson is that Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Front has now firmly established itself as a regular element of the French political equation. This may not appear self-evident from the second-round results. Her party secured only 62 departmental councillors out of some 4,000 countrywide. The FN looks unlikely to win control of any single department, although negotiations are under way in the southern department of Vaucluse where no party secured a majority.

Yet the FN’s achievement should not be underestimated. It beat the Socialist party in the first round at a national level, came top in nearly half the departments, and achieved scores of over 50% in many constituencies, including rural areas (which have become the front’s new political territory). The party’s total of 62 councillors is up from just two in the 2011 elections, and represents a handy widening of Ms Le Pen’s elected base in the run-up to the presidential election. She is now an accepted political figure in a three-block system. It no longer seems preposterous that she gives a televised address on election night shortly after Mr Valls and Mr Sarkozy, as if she were a party leader like any other. That is what she has now, in fact, become.

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