France's Socialists hold on to power in major cities in election boost for mainstream

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Paris and Marseille are held by the Socialists in local elections which saw the nationalist right win in Nice and certain towns.

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The new aspirants of the far-left and far-right also made gains – notably in Nice for an ally of Marine Le Pen and Roubaix in the north for the France Unbowed (LFI) party.

But the big lesson of the evening was the failure of alliances between mainstream left and LFI, with voters turning to the centre and right in long-time Socialist Party (PS) strongholds like Clermont-Ferrand and Brest.

On the contrary, in cities like Paris, Marseille and Lille – where incumbent Socialists steered clear of the far-left because of accusations of sectarian anti-Semitism in its ranks – left-wing administrations were comfortably returned.

Lyon – where the ecologist mayor Gregory Doucet did ally himself with LFI and still won – was seen as a case apart, because the right-wing challenger, businessman Jean-Michel Aulas, ran a poor campaign.

"My conclusion from tonight is that the LFI wins nothing – and what is worse it is the LFI that brings about defeat," said Pierre Jouvet, PS secretary-general.

There had been calls for a boycott of LFI after one of its parliamentary assistants was charged with incitement to murdering a far-right student in Lyon. The party's firebrand leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon also enraged his enemies when in a speech he seemed to joke about the Jewishness of the late sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein.

But after round one of voting a week ago, many Socialist and Green candidates decided to overlook their objections to the far-left party and formed what the right then termed "alliances of shame" in order – they hoped – to secure victory.

The alliances between left and far-left also failed to perform in Toulouse, Strasbourg, Poitiers, Limoges and Tulle. The last is the electoral fief of the former PS president François Hollande, whose calls for a boycott of LFI went unheeded there.

But reacting to the results Sunday evening the

Source: BBC