National Front Ahead In Regional Polls

National Front party leader Marine Le Pen speaks during a news conference Monday in Lille, France, following Sunday’s first-round voting in regional elections on Sunday.

The unpopular President Francois Hollande has seen his approval ratings jump since the Paris attacks, as he intensified French airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq and ordered a state of emergency at home.

“The verdict of the French tonight is clear”, Nicolas Sarkozy, former French president and leader of Les Republicains – included in the right-wing grouping – said in his post-election speech.

The FN won 28 percent of the vote, ahead of the centre-right Republican party of Nicolas Sarkozy, who polled 27 percent.

Marion Maréchal Le Pen, niece of the party leader, last week said Muslims could not be French because they rejected France’s “customs and morals” rooted in Christianity. The party is now calling for hard-line national security measures, like clamping down on immigration and tightening control over France’s borders.

On Twitter, Marine Le Pen said both the PS and Republicans “are crumbling” and “the French people are sick and exhausted of that old political world”.

Almost one-third of voters backed the anti-immigration FN, which won in six out of France’s 13 regions.

Riding a wave of Euro-skepticism and anti-immigrant feeling which has brought far-right parties to prominence across Europe, the breakthrough bolsters Le Pen’s position as a serious contender for the 2017 presidential election. JULIEN WARNAND / EPA Long thought-about a pariah, the National Front has by no means had such vital political power.

In the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a rustbelt bastion of the socialists who rule at national level, final estimates gave Ms Le Pen more than 40 per cent of the first-round vote. He said a victory for National Front ideas “would dramatically aggravate France’s situation and create conditions of unsafe disorder”. Le Pen reportedly described the result as “magnificent”, adding that it showed that the National Front was now “without contest the first party of France”.

Voters will elect more than 1,600 regional councillors from almost 21,500 candidates in France and the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Reunion to serve a five-year, three-month term.

Her eye is on the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections, with French politics now clearly a three-way race after Sunday’s election, ending decades of domination by the Socialists and conservatives. Sarkozy has refused any agreement with the Socialists to prevent the National Front from winning any of France’s 13 regions.