No breakthrough for France’s National Front, says new poll

In the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, Le Pen would win 47 percent of the vote while former minister Xavier Bertrand with the conservative Republicains would get 53 percent, the TNS Sofres-OnePoint poll showed.

Jewish leaders in Marseille, the main city in the other region most likely to be won by the FN, Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, called on voters to turn out and vote for the Republican slate, led by Nice mayor Christian Estrosi, and praised the “tremendous sacrifice” of the Socialists, who will have no representatives at all on the regional council.

The regional election outcomes are taken seriously since they are thought to be a bellweather for what will come when France votes in the 2017 national elections.

Since then, however, the third-placed Socialist Party has pulled out of the race in both those key regions, urging its supporters to back Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans in the run-offs on December 13 to keep the Front out of power. The final results will be determined in the second round this Sunday and will depend on the strategy of the two other parties: If they cooperate, they could still prevent an FN victory in many regions. “They fight each other, but they never really manage to explain what their proposals are, and the actual issues at stake for the voters are never raised”.

The electoral triumph of Marine Le Pen’s National Front is about the economy more than it is about fear or xenophobia.

Ms. Le Pen said that was too much for her, perhaps in part because she feared jeopardizing the progress she had made in shedding her party’s previous image as racist and anti-Semitic.

Like Le Pen, Trump blames some of his nation’s economic woes on a foreign invasion – a message encapsulated by his promise to build a wall on the Mexico border, and which resonates with America’s working classes, millions of whom are yet to recover from the financial crisis. Many conservative voters sympathize with the British desire to halt the flow of European Union migrants, the official said. The online poll took place two days after last Sunday’s first round.

“The National Front is an excellent first-round party”, said Camus.

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, who heads the country’s center-left Social Democrats, spoke for many when he called the French vote this week “a wake-up call for all democrats in Europe”. The FN aims to use any regional wins as a platform in its quest for national power in 2017 – so it will not seek to implement its national manifesto, but rather seek to prove it can responsibly govern large constituencies, and offer stability.

President Francois Hollande has stolen Le Pen’s anti-terrorist thunder by declaring war on Islamic State, ordering aggressive police raids against suspected terrorists in France itself, pledging more resources to intelligence services and police.

“Her youth motivates us, she represents us”, says the banner-wielding student with pierced ears.

“She has something hereditary, a political sense”, Lecointe said. “And they’re also profoundly dissatisfied with domestic political elites”, he said.

There is a significant new dimension to the FN as a whole with Le Pen at the helm, and this is the elimination of anti-Semitic rhetoric that had once helped define this extreme right party in the past. “Every day of the week, every minute of the day, they will hear about me”.

Those policy positions are not unrelated to what’s discernible from Trump’s daily ramblings, yet Le Pen knows a straightforward ban based on religion would be both politically unpalatable and legally unconstitutional.