French right win as Ecologists make breakthrough - 08/06/2009

Greens shake French politics

French president Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP swept to an easy victory in the European elections despite his personal unpopularity, almost doubling its number of MEPs. But it was the amazing breakthrough of the Ecologists, who got within a hair's breadth of the opposition Socialists, who will make the most headlines.

Sarkozy's centre-right party took almost twice as many votes as the Socialists, whose support collapsed to 16.48 per cent, a low not seen since their ignominious defeat by the Front National's Jean-Marie Le Pen in presidential elections in 2002. They are now tied with the Ecologists on 14 seats each. For Sarkozy, who finally got to host the US president Barack Obama and his family at the Elysee Palace this weekend after courting them for months, it was good news wherever he looked. His demolition of the French right continued, with Le Pen's Front National at its lowest ebb in decades. The career of his centrist arch-enemy Francois Bayrou is in ruins after his MoDem party took a battering.

But the big story of the night was the staggering rise of the greens of Europe Ecologie, led by the legendary leader of Paris's student rebellion of May 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who pushed the Socialists hard with 16.28 per cent of the vote nationally, according to some exit polls. In Paris they took 27.5 per cent, double that of the Socialist vote. The Ecologists had assembled a strong list headed by the campaigning anti-corruption magistrate Eva Joly (pictured) and peasant leader Jose Bove. Cohn-Bendit called it "D-Day for the environment", and within minutes of the results coming through, Sarkozy's ministers seemed to be tailoring their rhetoric accordingly, vaunting the government's Green record.

As well as a humiliating defeat for the Socialists, the Ecologists' victory could spell the end of Francois Bayrou's presidential ambitions after his centrist MoDem movement took a pasting, getting only 8.7 per cent. Bayrou's campaign came to a shambolic end when he accused Cohn-Bendit of paedophilia during an ugly TV debate hours after claiming that the government was plotting to destroy him.

The Socialists have been riven by infighting between their new leader Martine Aubry (right) and former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, who was beaten to the Elysee by Sarkozy two years ago. Instead of punishing the president for job losses and falling living standards, the French electorate took their frustration out on the Socialists, who even had difficulty calling a truce to their civil war to fight the campaign. Aubry, visibly shaken by the results, said they understood the public's anger and that her party now "needed profound rebuilding".

Yet even amid the celebrations of their historic victory, the biggest by a French governing party in a European election, there was score-settling within Sarkozy's UMP. Xavier Bertrand, who led the campaign and is tipped as a future prime minister, pointedly did not congratulate Rachida Dati, the glamorous justice minister Sarkozy forced to stand as a an MEP in order to push her out of her job.

The other surprise was the collapse of Le Pen's Front National, which almost beaten by the communist Left Front for the first time in decades. In the end it took 6.3 per cent, just ahead of the communists (6.05 per cent) and Olivier Besancenot's anti-capitalist party (6.1 per cent).

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