Victory for Marine Le Pen – regardless of outcome

Marine Le Pen, Election, PresidentFrench far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen waves to supporters during her meeting, Monday May 1, 2017, in Villepinte, outside Paris.(AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Marine Le Pen wins either way

 

Even though she lost her marks to Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the French presidential election, Marine Le Pen still won, experts believe.

On Sunday, the French go to the ballot boxes in the crucial round of the presidential election.

The center candidate Macron is poised to win, but Le Pen can still notch up a victory in her tally book, believes Sylvain Brouard, a researcher at Sciences Po, a well-known Institute of Political Science in Paris.

He indicated that the National Front received more than 1.25 million new supporters in the first round.

‘That’s absolutely huge. No other parties can show such progress’, Brouard told NTB news.

‘She is a definite winner; he insists, pointing out that both the socialist party and the conservatives lie with their core constituencies broken. It has long been claimed that there is a glass ceiling in France that prevents candidates from either the extreme right or left winning elections. But that story is now being shown to have become a fallacy,’ said the analyst.

‘In France, history is strewn with the tinkling of glass ceilings that have always been smashed to smithereens,’ he said.

The first test will be in the parliamentary elections in June. There, the National Front will make it a sharp race, believes Brouard.

‘We have an election system that gives bonuses to the strongest parties. Now the National Front are among the strongest.

Today, the party has only two of the 577 representatives in the National Assembly.

‘I will be very surprised if the election does not turn out to be a massive success for the party,’ says Brouard.

 

Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today