PARIS (Reuters) -- France’s far right performed worse than predicted in Sunday’s regional elections, exit polls showed Monday, leaving victory in the southern battleground of Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur and a platform for the 2022 presidential election in the balance.
Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National expressed frustration at a record low turnout, as the center right made its first comeback at the ballot box since a disastrous showing in the 2017 presidential election and President Emmanuel Macron’s party finished fifth.
The high abstention rate in Sunday’s first-round vote, projected at 68.5% by pollster Elabe, coincided with a sunny Sunday and emergence from months of tough COVID-19 curbs.
“I can only but regret this civic disaster, which has very largely deformed the electoral reality of the country and given a misleading idea of the political forces at play,” Le Pen said. “If you want things to change, get out and vote.”
An IPSOS exit poll showed the center-right Les Republicains winning 27.2% of the national vote, ahead of the far right on 19.3%, followed by the Green party, the Socialist Party and Macron’s La Republique en Marche on 11.2%.
For Le Pen’s far-right, that is a drop of more than 7 percentage points nationwide compared to the last election in 2015, which came on the back of the Paris Islamist attacks.
The regional elections, for which a second round of voting will be held on June 27, offer a taste of the voter mood ahead of next year, and a test of Le Pen’s credentials.
She has made a concerted push to detoxify her party’s image and erode the mainstream right’s vote with a less inflammatory brand of eurosceptic, anti-immigration populist politics.
In the northern Hauts-de-France region, Les Republicains performed stronger than expected, according to exit surveys, polling ahead of the far right with a wider-than-forecast margin.
The party’s lead candidate in the north, Xavier Bertrand, who is pitching to be the conservative’s presidential candidate in 2022, said the center right had shown it was the most effective bulwark against the far right.
Macron’s ruling party did as badly as expected, with party spokesperson Aurore Berge calling it a “slap in the face”. The president has failed to plant roots locally, although his popularity nationwide remains higher than his predecessors.
Opinion surveys project Le Pen will poll highest in the first round of next year’s presidential vote, propelled by a support base fed up with crime, threats to jobs from globalization and a ruling elite viewed as out of touch with ordinary citizens.