'Dumped by the electorate': French press sums up far-right flop in regional vote

Popular daily Le Parisien says Le Pen has been "Dumped by the electorate". Left-leaning Libération sees "The National Rally sent back to the drawing board".

For sober business daily Les Echos, the outcome of the last two weekends is a simple "Defeat for Le Pen", even if the party leader herself was not a candidate.

She had been hoping for victory in a few regions, notably in the industrial wastelands of the North, and along the ultraconservative Mediterranean coast. That would have strengthened her claim to being the prime challenger to Emmanuel Macron in next year's presidential race.

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Right-wing Le Figaro sees the outcome as a double sanction.

Certainly, says Le Figaro, Le Pen's defeat is a big story. But Macron will also limp away from these polls without much consolation.

The right-wing daily is careful to nuance its analysis in the light of the very poor turnout but nonetheless suggests that we now have a glimpse of the political landscape as we prepare for the presidential struggle.

That landscape is dominated by right-wing Républicans, features a scattering of Socialists, and has the inevitable ecologist or two. But Marine Le Pen's far right and the centre-left presidential majority are nowhere to be seen.

Centrist Le Monde says the main lesson of the past two weekends is for the French left, and it's that the socialists and their allies still don't have a leader.

The paper summarises the situation by noting the re-election of the big names on the right (Pécresse, Bertrand, Wauquiez) and the total defeat of the far-right.

The left managed to hold onto the five regions where it was already in power, but that won't do, says Le Monde, with parliamentary and presidential battles on the horizon.

And the much-vaunted pacts involving the combined electoral weight of the parties of the left and their Green allies failed to convince voters.

Le Monde also writes about what it calls "a series of serious breakdowns" in the distribution of election advertising, the information sent to voters by the parties, informing them of plans, propositions and policies.

Hundreds of envelopes containing election information were found abandoned in Ronchin, in the northern region. Hundreds more were burned in Haute Savoie. In the central Loiret, voters got a second delivery of the documents for the first round as they prepared to vote in the second.

The interior ministry estimates that 9 percent of the 44 million envelopes prepared for distribution before Sunday's second round were not delivered. That's getting on for five million voters left without any clear information about what was at stake.

To quote Républicans Party chief, Christian Jacob: "This is an unacceptable failure on the part of the national election service, and can only help to boost the rate of abstention."

There have been calls for a full, formal inquiry into what went wrong.