Pollsters: National Front routed in French vote

Le Pen is once again expected to be her party’s candidate in the next presidential elections, which are scheduled for 2017.

In the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region, she broke the symbolic 40-percent mark in the first round on December 6, exploiting anger over the dismal economy and the large numbers of migrants camped out in squalid conditions as they try desperately to reach Britain.

Similar Socialist tactics could also see Marion Marechal-Le Pen, Marine’s 26-year-old niece, lose in the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region by an even higher margin – 54 per cent to 46 per cent, according to one poll.

Boosted by fears about security and immigration after the Islamist militant attacks in Paris a month ago that killed 130 people, the National Front (FN) had won more votes than any other party nationally in last week’s first round.

But after the final stage of voting it appears Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservatives and their centre-right allies are the big winners with six of the 13 regions, the Interior Ministry said. Her party shook France a week ago by topping voting nationally in the first round.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls was prudent to sound a cautious note in his speech tonight: ‘tonight there is no relief, no triumphalism, no message of victory.

Sarkozy, weakened by his party’s poor showing in the first round, said the National Front’s high score should be a warning to all mainstream politicians. That resonates with many voters frustrated that governments left and right have failed to bring down France’s 10 per cent unemployment and at France’s shrinking global economic clout.

“There has been a smear campaign from the “system” and those who are part of it”, Front National leader Marine Le Pen told supporters in the northern commune of Hénin-Beaumont.

She hailed the “total eradication” of Socialist Party representation in the southeast and the northern regions that the tactical vote produced, and condemned the concerted campaigns against her as “defamation decided in gilded palaces”. This will help her build support for the presidential election in 2017. She said those who voted for her had resisted “intimidation, infantilization and manipulations”.

When her father Jean-Marie Le Pen did just this in 2002, it came as a thunderbolt of shock.

Chastened political leaders from the dominant center-left and center-right parties vowed to be more responsive to the concerns of those who voted for the National Front. “The danger of the extreme right has not been set aside, far from it”.

“Frankly, I’m voting towards the FN within the pursuits of my family”, stated Issa Kouyate, a fifty nine-yr-previous voter of Senegalese origin, as he went to forged his poll in Marseille, the place a excessive proportion of residents are of immigrant background.

The National Front has racked up political victories in local elections in recent years, but winning the most seats in an entire regional council would have been a substantial success.

The victor in Corsica was not affiliated with a major party.