The returns suggest the presidential election next year may be more wide open than it seemed. …
PARIS — It had seemed inevitable: another face-off in next year’s French presidential election between President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the rightist, anti-immigrant National Rally Party.
But after nationwide regional elections on Sunday, a rerun of the second round of the 2017 election appeared far less certain as both Mr. Macron’s centrist party, La République en Marche, and Ms. Le Pen’s party failed to win a single one of France’s 13 mainland regions.
The defeat was particularly crushing for Ms. Le Pen. She had portrayed the regional elections as a bellwether of her rise to power.
In the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, the one region where the National Rally led in the first round of voting a week ago, a center-right candidate, Renaud Muselier, defeated the National Rally candidate by a comfortable margin, taking about 57 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results.
The National Rally has never governed a French region, and on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen accused every other party of forming “unnatural alliances” and “doing everything to prevent us from showing the French people our capacity to run a regional executive.”
Stanislas Guerini, the director general of Mr. Macron’s party, said the results were “a disappointment for the presidential majority.”
They were also no surprise.
Since cobbling together his party as the vehicle for his ascent in 2017, Mr. Macron has shown little interest in its fortunes, relying instead on his personal authority and the aura of the presidency. The party, often known simply as En Marche, has never managed to establish itself on the regional or local
