A center-right party, Les Républicains, led the vote Sunday, while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which had high hopes, pulled ahead in only one region.
PARIS — French voters on Sunday inflicted a sharp setback on the far-right National Rally party in the first round of nationwide regional elections, dashing Marine Le Pen’s hopes of turning the vote into a springboard for next year’s presidential race.
A center-right party, Les Républicains, appeared to cement its hold on the country, positioning itself as a strong challenger to President Emmanuel Macron, whose centrist party trailed in all regions.
Polling agencies estimated Sunday that Les Républicains had pulled ahead in six of France’s 13 mainland regions, capturing about 30 percent of the vote nationwide. By contrast, National Rally came first in only one region and received 20 percent of the overall vote.
That was a sharp decline from the first-round results of the previous regional elections in 2015, when National Rally finished first in six regions.
“It’s a disappointment, for sure,” Louis Aliot, a leading party figure, told France 2 television minutes after the results were released.
Sunday’s vote was marked by a record-low turnout.
Roughly 34 percent of voters cast ballots, meaning that about 30 million people stayed away. In the last regional election, the turnout was 49 percent, while two decades ago it was almost 70 percent.
Though regional elections in France rarely carry high political stakes, this year’s were regarded as a bellwether for the approaching presidential race. Ms. Le Pen had unabashedly framed the contest as a dress rehearsal for the 2022 elections, in which she will most likely be the main challenger to Mr. Macron.
Several leaders of Les Républicains have also been counting on the regional elections to build momentum for a potential presidential bid.
The vote Sunday coincided with the first day of the lifting of an eight-month coronavirus curfew, the last remnant of a seemingly endless cycle of Covid-related restrictions that have fueled a deep sense of fatigue and frustration in the population.
The political campaign — which was delayed by a year because of the pandemic — has been marked by acts of violence against political leaders, letters from military personnel warning of an impending civil war and inflammatory speeches fueling France’s growing culture wars.
“We see a growing polarization of society, aggressive debates, an extremely frictional and inflammatory dimension,” said Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist at the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po university in Paris.
The second round of voting next Sunday will determine the final results, and changes in turnout between the two rounds could potentially shift the momentum in favor of one party or the other. But the center-right appeared on course to make strong gains.
In the northern region of Hauts-de-France, the candidate of Les Républicains, Xavier Bertrand, pulled ahead on Sunday with 43 percent of the vote. His main challenger, Sébastien Chenu of the National Rally, came second with only 24 percent of the vote — about 16 points down from 2015.
Mr. Bertrand, who is the incumbent candidate, said at a news conference that he had broken “the jaws of the National Rally, their demagogy, their sterile proposals, their intolerance.”
Mr. Bertrand has already announced his candidacy for the presidency, and the vote Sunday seems sure to give his campaign a boost.
By contrast, the results in the Hauts-de-France region made clear the failure of Mr. Macron’s party, La République en Marche, to plant roots locally. The party garnered only 8.5 percent of the vote, knocking it out of the next round of voting. (Parties need at least 10 percent of the vote to qualify.)
In most regions, Mr. Macron’s centrist party placed third or fourth, trailing mainstream parties on the right and the left. That was a blow to Mr. Macron’s ambitions to sideline the country’s old traditional parties in favor of his young political movement that straddles right and left.
“For us, it’s a slap in the face,” Aurore Bergé, a lawmaker for La République en Marche, told France 2.
Pascal Perrineau, a political science professor at Sciences Po university, said Sunday’s vote “shows that the old world is not dead at all,” adding that it had placed the French center-right as France’s leading political force.
The six mainland regions in which Les Républicains led included the Paris region, where it got 34 percent of the vote. The left came out on top in five regions, averaging around 25 percent of the vote in each.
The lone region that National Rally led the first round was the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, or PACA, where it garnered about 35 percent of the vote.
“If it is possible for the far right to win in PACA,” said Olivier Faure, the leader of the Socialist Party, he will ask his party’s candidate to withdraw from the race in the second round to prevent that.
In 2015, National Rally pulled ahead in six regions in the first round but was eventually defeated in all six in the runoff, as other competing parties formed alliances to keep the far right from power.
Ms. Le Pen has tried to soften her party’s image in recent years to win new converts who, until now, tried to block the far right from gaining power by voting for the best-positioned mainstream party in an election — a phenomenon known as the “Republican front.”
The “Republican front” began to crumble in last year’s municipal elections, when Ms. Le Pen’s party captured Perpignan, the first city of more than 120,000 residents to fall to the far right. Ms. Le Pen hoped this month’s elections would further accelerate those gains.
Nicolas Lebourg, a political scientist, said that Sunday’s vote was a “significant setback” for Ms. Le Pen’s party and a blow to her strategy of normalization. “All this storytelling is broken, and this is very annoying for Marine le Pen,” he said.
Ms. Le Pen said that the real cause of her party’s poor results was the lack of voter turnout.
“If you want things to change, you have to vote,” she said in a speech on Sunday. “Anything is possible, if you decide to do it.”
In France, where most powers are centralized, regional councils hold little influence over long-term policies, which is why some voters regard the regional elections as pointless. The councils oversee local infrastructure projects such as high schools, intercity transport networks or regional natural parks, but they barely have a say in major issues like security.
But this year’s campaign had special resonance.
It reflected the changing nature of France’s political landscape, which has increasingly lurched rightward in recent months amid heated debates over security, immigration and religious extremism.
In the Hauts-de-France region, Mr. Bertrand increasingly toughened his positions on security and justice issues to stave off a threat from his far-right challenger. And Mr. Macron has also been chasing voters on the right for several months, pushing forward bills on security and Islamist extremism.
Mr. Macron recently set off on a six-week political tour of France in an effort to reconnect with French people as they emerge from the coronavirus crisis. It appeared to be a first step in his expected 2022 re-election campaign.
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