Marine Le Pen wins seat in parliament but French far-right suffers huge losses
The National Front will be too small to form a parliamentary group which would have given it a role in setting the parliamentary agenda as well as influential committee positions
France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen won a seat in parliament for the first time on Sunday, but it was a bittersweet victory that masked an electoral debacle for her National Front (FN) party.
The feisty 48-year-old, who lost by a 20-point margin to Emmanuel Macron in May’s presidential run-off, won handily in her northern fiefdom of Henin-Beaumont, a depressed former mining town, with 58 per cent of the vote, she announced.
But her anti-EU, anti-immigration FN failed to capitalise on the populist wave that helped propel Donald Trump to the US presidency and spurred Britain’s vote to leave the EU.
Le Pen’s party won eight seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, dashing her one-time hopes of emerging as the main opposition to Macron’s centrist Republic on the Move (REM) party – also known as En Marche.
Le Pen said nevertheless that the FN, “against a bloc that represents the interests of the oligarchy, are the only force of resistance”.
The FN, against a bloc that represents the interests of the oligarchy, are the only force of resistance
REM and its centrist ally MoDem swept to a large majority with 351 seats.
