PARIS — Marine Le Pen's concession speech after her National Front party lost in every region of France on Sunday was anything but conciliatory, despite more than 70 percent of voters rejecting the far-right leader's message of hostility toward immigrants and open borders.
That intransigence, analysts say, is the key to both the National Front's history and its destiny, and the reason — in the absence of truly dire economic conditions — that a takeover by the far right in France is not likely anytime soon.
What gives the party its fiercely loyal following — its vituperative denunciation of migrants, its unconcealed hostility toward Muslims, its xenophobic "France for the French" message — also makes it an impossible partner for any political group closer to the mainstream and helps block its advancement as a political force.
Throughout the country, in Sunday's second round of regional voting, the mainstream parties formed a de facto alliance against the National Front, which even lost in the two regions where Le Pen and her niece Marion Maréchal Le Pen were favored to win.
In those areas, in the deindustrializing, high-unemployment north and in a south full of those who still regret the loss of French Algeria, the third-finishing Socialist Party pulled out of the race, letting the mainstream right party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy win.
Permanent outsider status for the National Front — outside the "golden palaces of the Republic," as Le Pen sneered Sunday — was the result. A similar dynamic was in play in departmental elections in March, when more than half of the left's voters switched to the mainstream right candidate in the second round, and the right won 535 out of 538 contests with the National Front.
Jérôme Fourquet, a polling expert, noted that the "Republican front was effective, as a big proportion of the left's voters voted for the right," meaning Sarkozy's party. In the southern region around Nice, 65 percent of those who voted Socialist in the first round voted for the right's candidate in the second, and in the north around Lille, where Le Pen was running, the figure was 70 percent, Fourquet said at a news conference.