Macron's party blames its defeat on lack of local presence

French government spokesman Gabriel Attal said today that "it is very hard to establish yourself locally when you are a new political party" to explain the failure of the party founded by President Emmanuel Macron in Sunday's regional elections.

In an interview on the public channel Franceinfo, Attal thus justified the disappointing role played in the regional elections by the party of which he is a member, La République en Marche (LREM), founded in 2017 by Macron to win the French presidency.

"The presidential elections (to be held in 2022) are not the regional elections," pointed out the government spokesman, who also recalled that the COVID context had played against him. "The voters did not have these elections in mind," said Attal.

The government spokesman announced that Macron will address the French people in a few weeks to discuss the country's political situation.

In the interview, Attal criticised "the triumphalism" of two of the politicians who came out on top in Sunday's election, the conservatives Xavier Bertrand (re-elected in the Hautes-de-France region) and Valérie Pécresse (in the Parisian region of Ile de France). "There has been too much triumphalism and I have heard little about the massive abstention" of almost two-thirds of the electorate (66.5 %), he lamented.

Months before the regional elections, Bertrand had already formalised his candidacy for the presidential elections in mid-2022 as an independent candidate of the Republican Party, which he was a member of until recently.

In addition to the presidential force LREM, another political formation that failed was the National Rally of the far-right Marine Le Pen, who failed to win any of the 13 regions at stake, which remained in the hands of the classic right and left (the Republicans and the Socialist Party, respectively).

Nevertheless, Macron and Le Pen remain the favourites for the second round of the presidential election in 2022, according to the polls.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen again fell short of winning a regional government on Sunday in the second round of an election in which the right and the left maintained their fiefdoms.

All eyes were on Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (PACA), where the far-right Thierry Mariani (36.38%) beat the conservative Renaud Muselier (31.91%) in the first round but was relegated to second place in this final round.

Muselier won with between 57 and 55 per cent of the vote, according to the partial results. "You have responded to the threat of the extreme right" to leave the region "free" of a government of that ideology, the regional conservative leader proclaimed.

The so-called "republican front" or cordon sanitaire, with the withdrawal of the left's candidacy after last Sunday's first round, worked again and blocked the party's aspirations in an election that, less than a year before the presidential elections, was seen as its springboard towards them. "The logic of unity" of the parties to stop the far right has won, Muselier stressed.

That region was the only one in which the RN had an advantage. Although pre-election polls gave it a chance of victory in six of the 13 metropolitan constituencies at stake, it had only held the lead there. Le Pen blamed the defeat on "unnatural alliances" made against her party.