Paris looked set to elect its first female mayor last night, but the victory for socialist Anne Hidalgo was an isolated piece of good news for President François Hollande's embattled party.
The exit polls showed that Spanish-born Ms Hidalgo (54) was estimated to have won, with 55 per cent of the vote, well ahead of her centre-right rival Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet.
If her victory is confirmed in a final count Ms Hidalgo will succeed the popular Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoe, who has run the city since 2001.
But Ms Hidalgo’s probable triumph was a rare moment for celebration in what was a dismal evening for Mr Hollande, whose popularity was already at rock bottom even before yesterday’s vote, and his Socialist (PS) government.
Protest vote
Elsewhere, the Front National appeared to have once again punched above its real electoral weight in what may well turn out to have been a protest vote.
The party's charismatic president, Marine Le Pen, said the results marked a "new step for the FN" and said she hoped to translate its success into seats in the European elections in May.
“The Front National has upset the traditional UMP-PS duo. From now on they will have to count on a third great political force in our country,” Ms Le Pen said.
The revival of the FN as the Socialists struggle takes the far-right party back to levels last seen in 2002 when far-right presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen knocked out the Socialist candidate in the first round of the presidential elections.
The FN took the towns of Beziers, where FN candidate Robert Menard, former head of Reporters Sans Frontiers, obtained more than 47 per cent of the vote, and Frejus, but lost the symbolic city of Avignon, where the FN candidate had led the first-round vote.
Most of the FN’s successes were in the east and west of the country in areas with high unemployment and immigration.
If there was any small consolation for the president and his administration, it was that while the centre-right UMP emerged overall winners, it was that the FN had not done as well as results of first-round voting last Sunday had suggested.
In the rest of the country, French voters stayed away from polling stations in record numbers for the second round of local elections.
The 38 per cent rate of abstention in the second round of the election was seen as a direct message of disillusion with the country’s ruling class, particularly the Socialist government headed by Mr Hollande.
Symbolic losses
Among the most symbolic losses for the governing Socialists were those of the town of Limoges, which the left had held since 1912, Saint Etienne, which fell to a UMP candidate, Belfort, which went to the right, and Quimper in Brittany, which elected an UMP mayor.
Jean-François Cope of the centre-right UMP said the local elections were an overwhelming success for his opposition party.
"It's a blue wave . . . the first major victory for the UP in a local election," he said. – ( Guardian service)