Le Pen led by a wide margin in the first round of voting on 6 December, but a poll by TNS-Sofres-OnePoint published on Wednesday suggested both Le Pen and her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, who is running in the south, would lose in the final round.
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France’s National Front may be defeated in the regional elections as an opinion poll showed tactical voting will keep it from power in two main target regions.
Both women had easily outpaced their conservative rivals in the first round, each grabbing over 40% of the vote, but the party’s hopes of winning its first-ever region could be crushed by its opponents’ political manoeuvring.
Maréchal-Le Pen, running in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, would take 46%, according to the poll, while her conservative rival Christian Estrosi would get 54%.
The Front National topped regional elections held over the weekend, and although they should be kept out of power in most of the country due to the second round of elections, the FN has never controlled any regions at all before.
“I think the French want to try out the National Front”, Le Pen declared this week, adding that if elected she would run her region “until I am elected president of the republic”.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a Socialist campaigning for weeks against the National Front, played the ultimate fear card Friday, saying on France-Inter radio that “the extreme right advocates division… that could lead to civil war”.
The first round poll put the Socialists ahead in only two regions and Sarkozy’s Republicans ahead in four.
“It makes no sense economically that public money goes to help foreign workers and migrants in a region where unemployment is higher than national average”, Marechal-Le Pen told Reuters in an interview last month.
Marine Le Pen quickly lashed out at Mr Valls in response to his attack on the party set up by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The councils in that run France’s 13 “super-regions”, created by Hollande from 22 smaller ones, can’t pass laws of their very own. Despite her Parisian upbringing, she connects with a region of small businesses and farmers deeply attached to tradition and the land, from France’s southern Alps to its vineyards and fields of lavender.
She and her niece have said in the past that they would refuse funding to interests representing a single community, a reference to Muslim groups. Muslims can be French citizens “only on condition that they bend to the customs and the way of life that Greek, Roman and 16 centuries of Christianity fashioned”.
“Let me remind the prime minister that the war being waged against France today is being waged by Islamist fundamentalists bottle-fed by a laxist, sectarian Socialist Party”, she said.
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. “She has the capacity to deliver”, Marc Lecointe, a 40-year-old finance professional, said at a Paris rally Thursday that brought together all 13 National Front candidates.
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“She has something hereditary, a political sense”, Lecointe said.
