Post-Paris attack election win for French far right National Front party

Mr Sarkozy, on the other hand, has ordered his party’s candidates to “neither withdraw nor merge” with the Left, leading Jean-Chrisophe Cambadélis, Socialist leader, to call his party the “final rampart against the extreme Right in France”.

Exit polls showed the FN gaining more than 40 percent in the two regions, in the north and south of the country respectively, well ahead of rival parties.

It was the first electoral test since last month’s Paris attacks, in which jihadist gunmen killed 130 people.

They projected that the National Front won between 27% and 30% of support in the voting, followed by former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans party and President Francois Hollande’s governing Socialists.

But no matter the result in the second round, Sunday’s vote is a clear warning that the National Front may be close to holding real power in France. A possible FN victory in the second round could be used as a launchpad for Le Pen’s presidential bid in 2017.

However, Le Pen and Marechal-Le Pen are expected to win in their respective regions, giving the National Front its first regional governments – a milestone in the history of the party, which so far has governed only a handful of small municipalities. Some Paris residents believe Le Pen is using the national mood of fear and anger over the recent terrorist attacks to her advantage. For the FN, this is the best in a series of strong performances over the past two years.

Mr Sarkozy refused to do any tactical deals with the PS for the second-round ballot.

French regions have wide powers over local transport, education and economic development.

The consequences of this approach have been predictably risible: because the Left has gone missing on the problem of Islamism, preferring to blame the entire phenomenon on foreign policy and often adopting the aforementioned neo-Orientalist mindset, the European far-Right has been able to portray itself as the only reliable foe of Islamist radicalism.

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. The breakthrough marks a shake-up of the country’s political landscape before the 2017 presidential elections, with the FN coming out top in six out of 13 regions. The region is an economically depressed area of some 6 million people that was formerly a heartland for Hollande’s Socialist Party.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls made an “appeal to patriotism” on Thursday in an effort to rally the Socialist vote.

Authorities continue to seek Salah Abdeslam, who is thought to have fled to Belgium after the killings, and Mohamed Abrini, who is accused of driving him to Paris.