The rise of France’s far-right from the 1980s to today, charted

Boosted by fears over the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) attacks that killed 130 people in Paris on November 13, as well as by record unemployment and immigration, Marine Le Pen’s party secured 29.4 percent of the vote nationally, the interior ministry said, with over 85 percent of the votes counted.

National Front candidates for regional council presidents, including Marine Le Pen and her 25-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen, have pledged to put their party’s policies into action by doing things like cutting funding for family-planning centers and the arts.

Mr Hollande has seen his personal ratings surge on the back of his hardline approach to security since the Paris carnage, but his party is being punished for a jobless total of almost 3-million.

Former president Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the centre-right Republicans, ruled out a tactical alliance, but the Socialists said they would withdraw some candidates to allow the centre-right candidate to garner more votes against the FN.

The last opinion poll on Friday by Ipsos-Sopra said the FN would take the largest slice of the vote – 29.5 percent – followed by a mix of right-wing and centrist parties on 28.5 percent and the ruling Socialists on 23 percent. In its former life, people were often too ashamed to reveal that they had voted for the National Front.

Mr Sarkozy, on the other hand, has ordered his party’s candidates to “neither withdraw nor merge” with the Left, leading Jean-Chrisophe Cambadélis, Socialist leader, to call his party the “final rampart against the extreme Right in France”.

The vote is also an important test of FN support ahead of the 2017 presidential election.

Jean-Marie was booted out of the National Front (FN) he founded by his own daughter in late August after a series of anti-Semitic and racist remarks that were deemed too damaging the party’s image. Cambadelis’ bid “to block” the far-right party would involve bowing out of races where the center-right Republicans were a clear second – in the expectation that Socialist voters might prefer them to Marine Le Pen. If anything, the Paris attacks were a vindication for Le Pen, who had long promised to strengthen French security forces and resist European Union integration.

The National Front led in six of the 12 regions of mainland France, The Republicans in four and the Socialists in two.

Christian Estrosi is the conservative rival in the southeast to Jean-Marie’s granddaughter and FN candidate Marion Marechal-Le Pen, who won more than 40% of the votes in the southern region of France. Since then is seems more, rather than less, likely she will top the first round of France’s presidential elections in 2017.

Though the power of French regions is mostly limited to infrastructure spending and tourism promotion, running a region provides both local bases and national platforms for the victors.