PARIS – French polling booths opened on Sunday for another round of local elections that have caused alarm and disarray in President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling party since the far-right National Front surged in first-round voting.
The polls gauge the national mood a year before presidential elections and will determine whether the anti-immigrant National Front gains a foothold in a handful of local councils, levers of grassroots political power.
Sarkozy’s UMP party has blurred the lines with the far right by taking a tough line on the integration of France’s large Muslim minority. The president’s popularity ratings are at record lows.
In the first round last Sunday, the Socialist Party scored best with 25 percent of votes, followed by Sarkozy’s UMP party with 17 percent and the National Front close behind with 15 percent, a record for the party. That results came hot on the heels of opinion polls indicating that Marine Le Pen, a tough-talking 42-year-old lawyer who took over as party chief from her ex-paratrooper father in January, could score more than Sarkozy in the opening-round of a presidential contest.
Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked France and the world when he made it to the second round of the presidential election in 2002. The party has a fresher face but is struggling to cast off an extremist image — it announced the expulsion on Saturday of one of its local election candidates after a magazine website published a photograph of him doing a Nazi salute.
More than 21 million people can vote in the local elections but only 9.5 million did so in round one, pushing the abstention rate to a record 56 percent in the last direct elections before presidential and legislative showdowns in the second quarter of 2012. At midday (1000 GMT) on Sunday, Interior Ministry figures showed a turnout of 13.69 percent, down two points from the same time in the first round.
The opposition Socialist Party, which is expected to extend its domination of local political power, has urged its supporters to vote for Sarkozy’s conservatives if it comes down to that to shut out National Front candidates. Sarkozy’s UMP has urged right-wingers to shun the National Front but not necessarily by voting Socialist.
