THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The far-Right party has taken a quarter of the popular vote, beating both president Hollande's Socialists and the centre-Right UMP
France’s political establishment was in total disarray on Monday as its main parties reeled from the “earthquake” of seeing the far-Right Front National (FN) come first in European elections.
François Hollande, the deeply unpopular president, staged a crisis cabinet meeting to find ways to parry what is the French Socialist Party’s worst score since European elections were first held in 1979.
Sunday’s election saw the FN clinch almost 25 per cent of the vote, quadrupling its 2009 score in what its leader Marine Le Pen said translated a “massive rejection of the European Union”.
“We are witnessing the total rejection of the system,” she told Le Monde on Monday. “This is a kind of patriotic revolution” pitting the FN against the two main political parties, the Socialists and the opposition centre-Right UMP.
“The split is now between ‘nationals and globalists’,” she claimed. » | Henry Samuel, Paris | Monday, May 26, 2014
