President Francois Hollande will try to relaunch his government and could sack his prime minister within days after his Socialist party took a beating in a French mayoral contest that saw a surge to the centre-Right opposition and victories for the far-Right National Front.
Less than two years since he defeated Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr Hollande was forced to acknowledge the rebuff that voters inflicted on his stumbling administration in yesterday’s run-off voting for thousands of village, town and city councils. The Socialists were expected to save their control of Paris, but elsewhere they lost more than a dozen cities as power swung towards the Union for a Popular Movement, the party that Mr Sarkozy built up a decade ago as his personal electoral machine.
In early results, the UMP took Limoges, Saint-Etienne, Reims and Angers from the Socialists.
However, the biggest splash in the run-off was expected to be the breakthrough in the Mediterranean region and the industrial northeast by Marine Le Pen’s National Front, which won Beziers, a city of 75,000 in the southwest, as well as Frejus, the second city in the Var departement, near the port of Toulon, according to early results. The Front was also expected to take Forbach in Lorraine, as well as perhaps winning Perpignan, near the Spanish frontier.
[…]
