Paris News: French Presidential is racing 2017 election of result "What?"
What the French election results mean for the 2017 presidential race In the end, the Front National did not take control of any of France's regional governments, despite going into Sunday's second round of voting having topped the first round in six of the country's 12 mainland regions. An 8.5-point increase in turnout compared with the first round, Socialist candidates withdrawing in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (where Marine Le Pen and her niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen represented the far-right's best chances of victory) and tactical voting all contributed to keeping the FN out. The Socialist party and its allies on the left held on to five regions, mostly in its historic strongholds. Although the left has lost 2.5m votes compared to 2010, when it won control of 21 of the then 22 metropolitan regional administrations, a bounty of five regions just a few weeks ago would have been seen as on the optimistic side of exp...