PARIS (AP) – France’s regional election runoffs Sunday has taken on extra importance after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party dominated first-round voting, selling its anti-immigrant, tough-on-security message to voters anxious about an unprecedented wave of refugees and Islamic State violence.
Advertisement
France’s Socialist prime minister warned on Friday of a slide towards “civil war” if the far-right National Front wins power in regional polls this weekend as a stepping stone towards its 2017 presidential election campaign.
A TNS-Sofres poll showed Le Pen, who heads the party list in the rustbelt northeastern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region, being beaten by the Republicans’ Xavier Bertrand by 53 percent to 47 percent.
Her niece Marion Marechal-Le-Pen likewise topped the vote in a key southeastern region that includes the Riviera coast called Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur (PACA).
Marine Le Pen, in the race for president of the northern region, went on the offensive three days before Sunday’s elections, and a day after a poll suggested she might lose.
Le Pen is known for her own provocative statements about “illegals” and Islam.
Socialist leader Manuel Valls, speaking on France Inter radio station, claimed a victory for the National Front (FN) – which has seen record gains in the first round of local voting – would only heighten divisions in a country still reeling from the Paris attacks in November. They’re urging their voters to support the mainstream conservative candidates in order to block the National Front.
The condemnation of Donald Trump crossed worldwide borders and party ideologies this week, the tycoon’s assertion that all Muslims should be barred from entering the USA receiving widespread opprobrium from right and left around the world. So when the National Front’s charismatic leader, Marine Le Pen, held a marketing crusade rally in Paris this current week, Camus took his place among the many boisterous, flag-waving crowd gathered at an opulent hall on the northwestern fringe of the city. Some of the differences may reflect the regions they are contesting, both with significant Muslim populations. 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.
“The Socialist Party is ending its (election) campaign in a delirium of outrageousness and eructations”, she said. They say we’re the party of fear, but they resort to lies and intimidation to keep us from being elected.
Since taking control of the National Front in 2011, Le Pen has sought to shed the party’s racist and anti-Semitic image to make it less toxic to voters.
Advertisement
The French model “has been abandoned in favor of the multicultural ideal, a kind of right to be different that I profoundly believe contributes to the French fracture”, she said. But she insisted that being part of the French republic means complying with “our customs and our way of life”.
