His daughter Marine, now leading the anti-Europe, anti-immigration party, and targeting the French presidency in 2017, topped the polls in the first round of regional elections on Sunday in a historic win.
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The National Front (FN) may lead in as many as six out of 13 regions after the first round on Sunday. By contrast, former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right Union for a Popular Movement gained only 26.6 percent of the vote, while President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party won only 23.1 percent.
Sarkozy’s conservative Republicans party and their allies came second in the overall national vote, at just under 27 percent, behind the far-right National Front but ahead of the Socialists at 22.7 percent, according to an interim count of the votes.
“This is a bad sign, because the National Front is becoming little by little more legitimate”, Alain Alpern, a former Green and Socialist party local councillor, told Reuters outside an Henin-Beaumont polling station.
These are key hours at Socialist and Republican headquarters in France after what even Le Monde described as an “historic result” of the Front National yesterday in the first round of regional elections.
In contrast, his Socialist party, which now runs almost all of France’s regions, has seen its electoral support shrivel as the government has failed to shrink 10 per cent joblessness or invigorate the economy.
The BBC’s Hugh Schofield called Le Pen’s gains “an astonishing performance for a party that until very recently was regarded as beyond the pale”.
Her 25-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen seemed to be heading for an equally strong score in the vast southeastern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region that includes beaches thronged by sun-seekers in the summer. But Socialist candidates who came in third place in the north and southeast have retreated from the race, following party instructions, in a bid to “block” the National Front from winning the runoff.
In her campaign, she has focused repeatedly on the migrant camp in Calais, “the Jungle”, where thousands of people have been camped for months trying to reach Britain and northern Europe.
Ms Le Pen condemned the PS for removing some nominees in the next round, saying the PS was “neither true nor democratic” and was “handling its voters like vote fodder”. The party’s founder and Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie is known to have ties in Moscow.
Le Pen has demanded a crackdown on Islamists in France.
“The strength of the National Front is that increasingly they are seen as an alternative to the failure of the governing parties”, Frederic Dabi, a pollster at Ifop, said on I-tele.
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The outcome also exposed faultlines within both the country’s main traditional political groupings over the right tactics to confront the FN in the decisive second round of the regional elections next Sunday. Polls suggest she could win.
