Fresh-faced star of France’s far right is candidate of steel

“Maybe when they know there is another party, they will reform the country”.

“Seriously, have you ever heard me say something like that?”

Hammering home her message that the FN offers an alternative route to the main forces of right and left, she vowed if elected to “make the government’s life a misery every day, every week”.

(AP Photo/Francois Mori). French far-right National Front Party leader, Marine Le Pen, left, and Far right National Front party regional leader for southeastern France, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, right, share a laugh at the end of a meeting in Paris, Fran…

Marine Le Pen’s FN is leading in six of 13 regions in mainland France.

The possibility of defeat at the final run-off would be a devastating blow for the far-right party who topped a first round vote nationally.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls has led the Socialist charge against the National Front – and warned Friday that its victory could sow divisions that “could lead to civil war”.

“There are two options for our country”.

He added: “Division and stigmatising people carry within them the seeds of civil war”. There is another vision, which is that of the Republic and its values’. Le Pen asked during an interview on a French TV program, according to The New York Times.

It should also be noted that France’s two-round voting system will prevent the National Front from controlling all the regions where it performed well December 6.

She is “a woman of velvet with a character of steel”, Stephane Ravier, a National Front senator, said as he introduced Marechal-Le Pen at a campaign rally Wednesday in Marseille. The Socialists have sacrificed their candidates in the regions where Le Pen and her niece are running, calling on voters to back the opposition.

Fears over immigration, the Islamic State attacks in Paris that killed 130 people last month, disaffection with mainstream politics and frustration at high unemployment were among factors behind the party’s best performance in its history.

Le Pen’s 115 page-long program for the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region says French secularism would be “strictly implemented”.

The first round poll put the Socialists ahead in only two regions and Sarkozy’s Republicans ahead in four. Other polls gave similar results.

The regional vote is the first since a reform that redrew boundaries to create 13 larger regions from 22 smaller ones before.

There, the Socialist lead candidate Jean-Pierre Masseret resisted his party’s call to step down, making the outcome of the three-way vote uncertain. “The FN’s biggest advantage is that it is not tainted by the errors of others”. Some 16 per cent of those surveyed planned to vote for Masseret. “It is clear in that the migrant crisis, like the attacks, placed at the center of political debate issues on which the National Front is in consideration … to be stronger – immigration issues, security issues and identity issues”, stated Joel Gombin, a researcher at the Observatory for Radicalism at the Jean-Jaures Foundation, a think tank.

If it wins one or more regions in Sunday’s runoff, that would be a first for the party, leaving the French public and much of the wider world to contemplate what would happen in a region ruled by the far right.