Re: French far-right makes major breakthrough to top regional elections
You sound rather positive about them.
Not in the least. I am simply relating the facts reported.
Let me put my point in other terms:
*France once had "regions" that constituted "towns and villages",
*Those regions have been consolidated into "states" and now have "governors",
*This election was about who would govern the states, meaning obtain a majority in the state legislatures.
Marine LePen found in the pre-election poll results that the FN had a chance to run at least one state. The fact is that the first three-way primary-vote was one indicating profound resentment for the present economic situation. Turnout was low.
But, people got scared of the good FN-results. So, the second voting lifted electorate-numbers voting, and LePen lost that vote to govern a state because the FN could not muster a majority in the legislatures.
However, the total of FN representatives to the state legislatures increased - which showed:
(1) Many of the persistently unemployed young decided that the FN was not "all that bad after-all" (and the recent Paris Massacre diminished somewhat their feelings for the anti-Muslim sentiments of the FN). And,
(2) Many of those cities run by the FN were not shown to be "dens of Nazism" as the FN is often portrayed.
Both caused changes in voting sentiment regarding the FN.
I still believe that the FN has no future in France. But running a small town is not rocket-science. Budgets are small and there is not much room for chicanery or fraud, as happens in larger cities. So, the French are learning to "trust FN elected officials". At least one FN-mayor has been convicted of fraud whilst in office. (He was one added to a long historical list of other national-party mayors of the same fate.)
That the FN gained numbers in state-legislatures is sad, but it is a political fact; one largely due to the stagnation of the two main-parties (one Left the other Right) who simply exchange seats in the French legislature, but do not change governance of the country. And why?
As I never tire of saying, the French generally do not understand how their country is no longer the place where international investors really care to invest. Here's why:
*Ireland has been the major European production center for electronics due to lower labor-costs, and Germany produces high-content equipment at a higher price but a recognized higher value in terms of product reliability and on-time delivery.
*When they realized they could not compete against the China-price, many French companies dumped production (but not distribution) of their products in France and contracted Chinese manufacturers instead, and
*Lots of Russians have bought mega-euro villas on the Riviera, and even the Chinese have bought vineyards in Bordeaux, but this activity has no major impact upon the economy.
None of the above factors is the kind of investment that generates jobs in France that young graduates are looking to obtain. And the hot-shot kids who are failing a secondary-schooling degree find themselves between a rock and a hard-place as regards employment.
Every now-and-then a "story" pops-up on TV about how a company brought its manufacturing back from China. When you read-between-the-lines, however, it is obvious that the previous labor-intensive manufacturing has been replaced by expensive automated production methods. Run by fewer people, yes, but producing at a cost that still allows them to compete with Chinese manufacturers (who have undergone significant cost of labor increases over the past 5 years).
Now that production automation, however, must be amortized in costs over a long period of time. And the French manufacturers must hope that Chinese production costs will continue to rise ...
