THERE MAY be a second round still to come, but the French left made little effort to conceal its joy yesterday when official regional election results confirmed a heavy defeat for French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s party.
“Waterloo? Sedan? Agincourt? The Berezina? One hesitates . . . In any case, the French right has just had one of the worst performances in its history,” gloated the left-wing daily Libération.
The results have turned out to be even worse than anticipated for Mr Sarkozy’s UMP, with the Socialist Party comfortably pushing the ruling centre-right bloc into second place, by 29.5 per cent to 26.2 per cent, figures from the interior ministry showed.
Not only is the Socialist Party now the most popular in France, but the Europe Écologie alliance has tightened its hold on third place, with a 12.5 per cent share of the vote, while left-wing groups combined took more than 50 per cent.
Talks have already begun between the Socialists and the Greens on forming an alliance to secure left-wing control of regional authorities when the second round of voting takes place next Sunday.
To make matters worse for the president, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front (FN) has recovered from a poor showing in the 2007 presidential election to take almost 12 per cent of the vote.
With many of the FN’s candidates having passed the 10 per cent threshold needed to make it to the second round, right-wing support will be split two ways in a number of regions, allowing the united left to reap the benefit.
As a result, the most optimistic scenario for the UMP next weekend is holding Alsace and Corsica, the only two regions in the French métropole that it currently controls. It could yet lose both.
No doubt foreseeing a setback, Mr Sarkozy had played down the national significance of the election last week, and the UMP leadership believes the record abstention rate of 53 per cent had a disproportionate effect on its vote.
“Nothing is decided yet,” said Jean-François Copé, the head of the UMP in the National Assembly. “We don’t know yet which voters abstained. The key is a major mobilisation for the second round.”
If Mr Sarkozy has incurred the most damage, who emerges strengthened from the first round?
Martine Aubry, the Socialist Party leader, put the party’s dismal showing in last year’s European elections behind her, and takes personal credit for a party campaign in which hers was the most prominent voice.
So too does one of her main rivals, Ségolène Royal, who will be buoyed by her thumping win after a quasi-independent campaign in Poitou Charentes, as well as the young Green leader, Cécile Duflot.
On the other side of the spectrum, Mr Le Pen can claim to have confounded the pollsters one last time. In what is expected to be his last election as leader of the FN, the 81-year-old won a massive 20 per cent in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, while the woman who hopes to succeed him – his daughter, Marine Le Pen – took more than 18 per cent in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region.
Mr Sarkozy, meanwhile, will hope the damage can be contained next weekend, and console himself with the knowledge that the next presidential election is still more than two years away. He may prefer not to be reminded of the long-established theory that while regional elections are not all that important in themselves, they tend to be quite useful as political windsocks.
After all, the government’s defeat in 2004 presaged the rejection of the European constitution the following year, while the FN’s strong showing in 1998 prepared the ground for its spectacular second-place finish in the presidential election of 2002.
“Every time, it’s the same scenario,” Le Figaro remarked on the eve of Sunday’s election.
“The campaign bores everyone, we all think about other things, but when the election is over, the political landscape is permanently changed.”