French PM warns of ‘civil war’ if far-right wins elections

ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Marion Marechal-Le Pen is the niece of National Front leader Marine Le Pen and the granddaughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, and this crowd in Marseille can’t get enough of her. This svelte blonde lawyer and mother is the hallmark of the party’s success in this round of elections. Such an outcome would be a major setback for the National Front – and for Marine Le Pen’s planned bid for the presidency in 2017.

Much attention will also be focused on the northeast Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region, where the Socialist candidate rejected his party’s call to drop out of the run-offs. The same was true for Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal Le Pen, who had an identical showing within the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, a stronghold of the normal right. The party took 30 percent of the vote in the first round of France’s regional elections this week.

“I am convinced that the Socialist voters will be able to go vote for the opposition this Sunday to defeat the National Front”, Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on France Inter radio Friday, referring to The Republicans led by Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president.

She is the youngest lawmaker that is French and in an election this weekend could become the youngest president of an area that is strong.

Le Pen softened her usually trenchant stance in a reach-out to left and right, saying her party represents a new way where “patriots” respect the interests of the regions and clans and “political fraud” have no place.

The councils that run France’s 13 “super-regions”, created by Hollande from 22 smaller ones, can not pass laws of their own. They’re urging their voters to support the mainstream conservative candidates in order to block the National Front.

Another idea of France was on show at a farm in northern France on Wednesday as Le Pen pitched her anti-European Union message.

With two days to the final ballot, and latest opinion polls suggesting a very tight contest with the FN slightly behind in its key regions, Marine Le Pen dismissed Valls’ civil war salvo as a “delirious outburst”. While softening the party’s image, FN is still staunchly nationalistic, and Le Pen remains outspoken in her calls for the restoration of France’s “territorial, monetary, legislative and economic” sovereignty-and her denunciation of Islam.

“The north has the biggest agricultural industry in France”, she said to a few dozen locals and nearly as many journalists from Paris.

Polls suggest that the National Front will likely be unable to match its success in the second round of voting Sunday because one-on-one votes will favor the more traditional parties.

The French model “has been abandoned in favor of the multicultural ideal, a kind of right to be different that I profoundly believe contributes to the French fracture”, she said.

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. After a first round of voting, the National Front is in the lead.