French PM says far-right win would open road to civil war

A TNS-Sofres poll showed Ms Le Pen, who heads the party list in the rustbelt north-eastern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, behind the Republicans’ Mr Xavier Bertrand by 47 per cent to 53 per cent. The same was true for Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal Le Pen, who had a similar showing in the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, a stronghold of the traditional right.

France is due to hold the second round of regional elections in which the far-right National Front (FN) is seeking to consolidate its gains from a week ago.

According to local reports, the National Front, which is an anti-immigrant and anti-EU political party aiming to drop the euro currency, secured 27.7 percent of the vote – the largest – in the first round of the elections last Sunday. “I think the French want to try out the National Front”, Le Pen declared this week, adding that if elected she would run her region “until I am elected president of the republic”.

That’s in part because the struggling Socialists, the party of President Francois Hollande, withdrew their candidates in both regions in favor of rival conservatives – in hopes of keeping the Le Pens out of power.

She has opened her arms to all French, expelling her father, the party’s co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, and others accused of turning the party into a refuge for neo-Nazi thugs.

The two National Front women scored more than 40 percent each in the first round.

“Let me remind the prime minister that the war being waged against France today is being waged by Islamist fundamentalists bottle-fed by a laxist, sectarian Socialist Party”, she said. Such an outcome would be a setback for the FN and for Le Pen’s planned campaign for the French presidency in 2017. Some concepts initially proposed by Le Pen have been picked up by more centrist politicians & even by Hollande’s left-leaning authorities which is in search of expanded powers to expel foreigners who “preach hate” & strip dual-nationals who’re convicted of terrorism of their citizenship – even when they have been born in France. Le Pen and her niece have said that they would refuse funding to interests representing a single community, a reference to Muslim groups. Whether or not FN takes home further wins in the second round this Sunday, the fringe party’s rising popularity has been firmly established.

The poll for newspaper Le Figaro and television channel LCI was conducted online 8 December with 803 respondents in both regions.

Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said this past week she was anxious about what would happen to high schools if the FN won regional power. Muslims can be French citizens “only on condition that they bend to the customs and the way of life that Greek, Roman and 16 centuries of Christianity fashioned”.

The French model “has been abandoned in favor of the multicultural ideal, a kind of right to be different that I profoundly believe contributes to the French fracture”, she said.

Marechal-Le Pen makes it clear she opposes her grandfather’s anti-Semitic remarks, which triggered the feud, but embraces his overall message, including the fear that Islam will overtake French civilization.

“She has something hereditary, a political sense”, Lecointe said.