National Front: What does Le Pen triumph for Europe

Following Sunday’s historic score of the Front National, the Socialist Party has chose to withdraw his lists in three regions where it came third while rightist “Les Republicans” party’s leader and former President of France Nicolas Sarkozy said he opposed a “Republican front” with the PS against the FN.

France’s far-right National Front ran strongly in a first-round regional vote that was the first election since an attack by Islamic extremists left 130 dead in Paris.

Just weeks after the terrorist attacks in Paris, the ruling Socialists and the conservative Republicans find themselves for the first time trailing the National Front of Marine Le Pen in six out of 13 regions.

Cosse said the party supporters should vote for the Republican candidates Christian Estrosi in the Provence-Alpes-Cote-d’Azur southeastern region and Xavier Bertrand in the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region. The left-wing Socialists of President Francois Hollande finished third with 23.5 percent.

As this chart in Quartz shows, however, the party has made gains in the past several electoral cycles, thanks in part to the efforts of Le Pen – daughter of the National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen – to bring the party into the mainstream. Support for the party has grown since the Paris attacks on November 13. The party also placed first in last year’s elections in France for the European Parliament, gaining 25 percent of the vote. She has also sharpened its criticism of global capitalism and added calls for France to withdraw from the eurozone to its traditional campaign against immigration.

The next presidential elections in France will be held in 2017.

These two regions could fall to the FN in the December 13 second round.

FN leader Marine Le Pen gave a triumphant victory speech, declaring this the start of a new era in politics where her ideas would dominate. What Ms. Le Pen described as “lost territories” were the French city of Calais on the English Channel, which now has more than 4,000 migrants on its doorstep hoping to reach Britain, and the suburbs of major French cities, many of which have sizable Muslim populations.

She said: “We are not a land of Islam”.