Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front (FN), “disenfranchised by”

CLEMENT MAHOUDEAU/EPA A supporter reacts after National Front’s Marion Marechal Le Pen (not pictured) loses the second round of 2015 French regional election at the party headquarters in Marseille, France, on Sunday.

Far-right National Front party collapsed in French regional elections Sunday after dominating the first round of voting, according to pollsters’ projections.(AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau)PARIS (AP) – The latest about France’s regional elections.

A leading figure in former President Nicolas Sarkozys conservative party, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, said that if the Socialists hadnt acted this time, “our candidates tonight… would have lost” against the Le Pens.

Ironically, while President François Hollande’s ruling Socialists lost a string of regions going from 21 out of 22 under the old system to five out of 13 in the new, the result is far less of a drubbing than expected and is less of a collapse than in other recent elections.

Polling agencies projected that his Republicans party won about 57 percent of the vote in the Nord-Pas de Calais-Picardie region, more than doubling his score from the December 6 first round.

France remains officially in a state of emergency, nearly a month after the Islamic State-inspired terror attacks across Paris that left 130 people dead.

Fearing a Front takeover in two regions where Socialist candidates finished third – the north around Lille, where Ms. Le Pen was running, and the south around Nice, where her niece was the top candidate – the Socialist Party withdrew its candidates for the second round.

The election was also the last before presidential and parliamentary polls in 2017, and the FN had been hoping to use it as a springboard for Marine Le Pen’s presidential bid. “The danger of the extreme right has not been set aside, far from it”. That’s a foretaste of what may happen in the 2017 presidential vote. And most importantly, the National Front failed to obtain the majority in any of the 13 regions.

But Le Pen’s electoral strategists will be looking at different signals, and finding plenty of encouragement.

In a way, the election did not really have a victor: the socialists lost seats to the center-right, which should have capitalized more on dissatisfaction with the current government and owed much of their gains to socialist supporters. In contrast, the left and right joined forces in 2002 to block party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marines firebrand father, from winning the presidency.

“Nothing can stop us now”, she says.

After a week of political brinkmanship and warnings from mainstream parties about the strength of the National Front, turnout was higher than in 2010. The atmosphere was grim, in stark contrast to a week earlier when Le Pen won more than 40% of the vote – and was more than 15 points ahead of Bertrand. While they failed to win control of any regions in the final round of local elections, they still won a record number of votes totaling at least 6.6m. Parties securing more than 10 per cent of the votes in the first round were allowed to run in a second round. Republicans and Socialists will fight each other for months and in the end they will team up to eliminate FN.

“It’s the price to pay for the emancipation of a people”, she said after the voting.

For Sarkozy, who faces a primary election inside his party next year to choose the opposition candidate for the presidential vote, the rise of the FN questions his claim to be a “rampart” against the far right.