France’s far-right National Front in battle for historic election win

The Front came first nationally in the regional elections’ first round on December 6 and led in six regions out of 13, including the north where Le Pen is standing and the southeast, where her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen is the lead candidate.

Valls, who is carrying out a major campaign to prevent National Front leader Marine Le Pen from emerging victorious in the elections this weekend, has even gone as far as calling on left-leaning voters to back mainstream right-wing candidates so that Le Pen and her affiliates could not win the polls. Current polls had Le Pen trailing her center-right rival within the historically Socialist northern region referred to as Nord-Pas-De-Calais-Picardie, where the National Front won greater than 40% of the vote within the 1st spherical.

Many National Front critics agree with Ms. Le Pen’s Monday-morning analysis that the traditional parties are “crumbling” and that “the French people are sick and exhausted of that old political world”.

“One is the extreme right, which basically stands for division, a division that can lead to civil war”.

Mr. Trump on Monday evoked comparisons to Ms. Le Pen and her European counterparts with his call to close American borders to all Muslims “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”.

“The keyword will be ‘pragmatism, ‘ not ‘ideology, ‘” Marine Le Pen told a last campaign rally on Thursday evening after opinion polls showed her party’s prospects have waned since the first round and that tactical voting could keep it out of power in its key target regions. 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. Le Pen and her niece have said that they would refuse funding to interests representing a single community, a reference to Muslim groups.

“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.

The FN has never managed any constituency larger than a few small and medium-sized towns, and winning a region is key to its strategy to try and convince voters it could eventually be trusted to rule the country.

“These are unprecedented scores”, Guillaume Tabard, a political columnist for the French newspaper Le Figaro, said in an interview.

She walked that stance back a bit this week on iTele TV, stressing that all immigrants are expected to exchange their customs for the French way of life. He has been ostracized by daughter Marine in a family feud that at one point risked fracturing the party.

But the anti-immigration, anti-Europe National Front (FN) is by no means certain to win in any of the 13 regions in this Sunday’s run-offs.

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. The crowd whooped when Marechal-Le Pen took the stage – and spontaneously erupted in a “Happy Birthday” song for her.