France’s far-right National Front leads in regional elections

Marine Le Pen’s FN came first in six of 13 regions in the first round.

Her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen stood in Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur in the south. Both won more than 40% of the vote, breaking previous records for the party. The election was the first election since the November 13 terrorist attacks caused to kill 130 people and injure at least 350.

If we fail, Islamist totalitarianism will take power in our country.

“This is a bad sign, because the National Front is becoming little by little more legitimate”, Alain Alpern, a former Green and Socialist party local councillor, told Reuters outside an Henin-Beaumont polling station. Additionally, the 6 million votes the National Front obtained in the regional elections are not enough to win the second round of a presidential election, which means the party still has to convince a larger number of voters if it wants to control the Elysee in 2017. The left-wing Socialists, President Francois Hollande’s party, came in third with 23.5 percent, according to France 24.

The trend is clear: the far-right is steadily gaining support in France, moving ever closer to the real levers of power after decades on the fringes.

“There is too big of a risk of victory for the National Front for us to keep our candidates in this region”, said Bruno Le Roux, the Socialists’ parliamentary leader.

Marine Le Pen has distanced the FN from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded it and has been prosecuted for anti-Semitism.

One is a pragmatist: a 47-year-old lawyer by training who has steered France’s far-right National Front (FN) from pariah status to mainstream.

Le Pen senior was thwarted in his bid for the presidency in 2002 when the Socialist Party used a similar tactic to the one they deployed on Monday.

“We do not own the voices of our voters”, Sarkozy’s former foreign minister Alain Juppe said after the Republicans issued a statement ruling out alliances with the Socialists which they said “would give the French the feeling that we are confiscating the election by striking tactical deals behind their backs”.

An opinion poll in Le Parisien on Monday suggested LR and its centre-right allies, including the centrist MoDem party, will poll 59% of the vote in the second round next Sunday, against 41% for the FN. “Do not allow the Republic to fall”, the group said in a statement.

The party were criticised over an election poster imploring voters to “Choose Your Suburb”, accompanied by a picture of a veiled woman, and an unveiled woman with the French tricolore painted on her cheeks.

Marine Le Pen attributes her party’s high scores to the nature of the political class, and the system it defends.

“She had won before the vote”.