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Local representatives of the president’s party are leaving the party logo off election material to avoid ‘punishment’ vote Nicolas Sarkozy is braced for his last political test before next year’s bruising presidential race as local elections this weekend are expected to expose France’s vast disillusionment with its ruling class. Half of France will vote on Sunday to appoint about 2,000 local councillors in cantons, the smallest segment in France’s labyrinthine local administration. But the first round vote was expected to show abstention hitting record levels of over 50%. By 5pm, there had been a turn-out of only 36%, low for a local vote. One year before the presidential vote, local representatives of Sarkozy’s ruling right-wing UMP party are so fearful of a backlash “punishment” vote against Sarkozy that many of them have deliberately left the party logo off their election material and beseeched party leaders not to canvas on their behalf, embarrassing the government. At one meeting last week in Le Raincy, a right-wing residential town surrounded by the neglected high-rise ghettos that saw France’s worst urban riots in 2005, the higher education minister Valerie Pécresse tried to rally the troops by quoting Winston Churchill on the need for courage. She blamed the financial crisis for the nation’s extreme pessimism, arguing that Sarkozy was still the best hope for the 2012 presidential race. “When a country goes through a storm it needs a captain to steep up to the bridge,” she said. Imploring candidates to remind voters that Sarkozy had succeeded in changing France, she cited only three reforms, the raising of the pension age, an overhaul of universities and compulsory minimum service on public transport on strike days, which means France can no longer be paralysed by industrial action. The Socialist party hopes to detract attention from its own bitter-infighting over who it will chose as its presidential candidate and capitalise on the mood against Sarkozy. Before the military invention against Libya, the president was festering at his lowest ever approval ratings in the polls, 29%, with two polls showing him knocked out of the first-round presidential race by the extreme right Front National. The left, which trounced Sarkozy’s party in the regional elections last year, currently holds 58 department councils up for election and wants to push above 60. The right holds 42 councils and could lose 12 of them, including La Sarthe, the rural fiefdom of the prime minister, Francois Fillon. The much-reduced Communist Party is battling to hold onto the last vestige of the “red” working-class suburbs of Paris, Val-de-Marne, in the east. The vote is the first electoral test for the new Front National leader, Marine Le Pen. Seven out of 12 polls in a space of eleven days showed her getting through to the final round of the presidential race in 2012. But the local “cantonales” elections have never been an easy ground for the party, which currently has no local councillors at this level. The FN is keen to make ground in the old mining communities of Pas-de-Calais where Le Pen made her name. However it is Le Pen’s rhetoric against immigration and the “islamification” of France that has dominated public debate in the run up to the elections and set the tone for Sarkozy’s UMP party which has tried to win back ground by organising a controversial debate on islam and secularism for April 5. When the new interior minister and former Sarkozy advisor Claude Gueant said last week that “French people no longer feel at home in France” he was lampooned by the left for veering onto extreme right territory. If the left do well in the local elections, it could have a direct bearing on the French senate and cause another headache for Sarkozy. Half the senatorial seats are up for renewal in September, voted for by local representatives. A surge in the left at the local level could make it hard for the right to keep hold of the senate, causing difficulties for Sarkozy’s ability to govern in his final months. France Europe Nicolas Sarkozy Angelique Chrisafis guardian.co.uk