But Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls was less upbeat.
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The FN had argued that the political manoeuvring by the main two political parties showed that they were two sides of the same coin and that the far-right offered the only real political alternative.
Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, took 46 percent in the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region, compared with 53.7 percent for conservative Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi.
The Conservatives will also take the other target regions south-eastern and eastern regions, the poll found.
But analysts cautioned that it would be a mistake to discount the party, which has cemented its position in the French political mainstream with steady electoral gains since Le Pen took the helm from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011.
Despite the FN failing to grab its first-ever region, Marine Le Pen will still use her party’s performance as a springboard for her bid for the 2017 presidential election.
Here the French gave a lesson of rallying together, courage.
The National Front advocates strong worker protections, long-term unemployment benefits and a nationalist trade policy, Eleanor notes.
Early results had the governing Socialists winning four to five regions, with the mainstream conservative Republicans perhaps taking the rest, including Paris. The results were based on the count of between 71 percent and 100 percent of the votes in each region. The atmosphere was grim, in stark contrast to a week earlier when Le Pen won more than 40 percent of the vote – and was more than 15 points ahead of Bertrand.
Le Pen said the result would not discourage the “inexorable rise, election after election, of a national movement” behind her party.
Sunday’s turnout at about 50 percent was up significantly from the first round, and seven percent higher than for France’s previous regional polls in 2010. The second-round turnout at the same time five years ago was 43.
Indeed, the Republicains candidate who routed Le Pen in a critical regional election thanked leftist voters for supporting him and keeping the anti-immigrant National Front from power.
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.
This will have played a key role in Marine’s loss tonight, in the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardia region.
It includes Calais where thousands of migrants are camped in the squalid camp known as the “new jungle” in the dim hope of reaching Britain.
In May past year, the party had unprecedented success in France’s European elections, winning 25.41% of the vote – enough for 23 seats in the European Parliament. “Congratulations, too, for throwing off the indecent slogans, the campaigns of… defamation that were decided in the gilded palaces of the Republic”, she said.
‘Maybe it will make all those politicians stop and think’.
Le Pen is once again expected to be her party’s candidate in the next presidential elections, which are scheduled for 2017. The younger Le Pen has repackaged herself as a clarion voice for the working class and struggling small-business owners.
She also denounced “this giant campaign of insults, slander, fear” by her rivals during a bitter campaign.
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Le Pen won about 42 percent in the runoff, and her party dominated voting nationwide in what Bertrand called a “thunderbolt”.
