France is heading to the polling stations for the second round of regional elections after last week's results proved disastrous for President Emmanuel Macron's ruling party and disappointment for Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN). 

Last week, Macron's Republic on the Move (LREM) party did not win any of the 13 regions, despite Macron himself partaking in a nationwide tour to campaign for votes. In some regions, his party did not win the necessary 10 percent of the vote to move on to the next round.

For some, this proved that his party was unable to translate his presidential win into regional and local support.

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The RN also did worse than expected, despite polls before the election claiming that it was the front runner for multiple regions. It now only has the possibility of winning one region, the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, where Marseille is located. 

If successful, it will be the first time that Le Pen's anti-immigrant party has ever won a region and would help her gain legitimacy in the eyes of French voters ahead of the next presidential elections.

After the first round, Le Pen pointed to record-low abstentions as the reason behind the RN's poor results. "I can only but regret this civic disaster, which has very largely deformed the electoral reality of the country and given a misleading idea of the political forces at play," Le Pen said last week.

Around 67 percent of French voters did not cast a ballot last Sunday, the lowest turnout since 1958. And the turnout for the second round is looking similar, with only 12.66 percent of voters having cast a vote four hours after the polls opened. 

However, some analysts are not convinced the regional elections are a good indicator for predicting the presidential campaign.

Antoine Bristielle, who works for the think tank Jean-Jaures Foundation, told AFP: "It would be a mistake to think that because the National Rally's score is lower than expected, it will automatically affect Marine Le Pen's presidential campaign in 2022.

"The dynamics are completely different."

And Brice Teinturier, the head of the Ipsos polling group, told France Inter radio that "these are elections marked by the emergence from the pandemic and the indifference of French people towards the specific stakes of this election, which they found hard to identify."

Despite this, there were unexpected winners of the first round, such as center-right presidential hopeful Xavier Bertrand.

Bertrand ran in the northern Hauts-de-France region, and exit polls after the first round showed that he won between 39 and 47 percent of the vote, making him a front runner. He has positioned himself as the opposition to Le Pen in the next elections.

"We've unlocked the jaws of the National Front to smash them here," he said.