The FN, led by Marine Le Pen, garnered around 28 percent of the vote nationwide and topped the list in at least six of 13 regions, according to the interior ministry.
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Overall, the National Front won 30.8 percent of the votes, followed by former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Les Republicains (moderate right) party with 27.2 percent and current President François Hollande’s Socialist Party trailing with 22.7 percent, BBC reported. I’m not a fan of Le Pen or her National Front party, but when the rest of France’s political establishment, including the so-called conservatives, is so consistently weak-minded, it should not surprise us that French voters would respond to Le Pen’s clarity and directness.
The party is also pulling out its candidate from the eastern Alsace-Champagne Ardenne-Lorraine region.
FN leader Marine Le Pen is likely to win in the northern region of Nord-Pas-De-Calais-Picardie, while her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen is a leading contender in Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur in the south.
The rise of attacks by Islamist extremists, combined with the migrant crisis that has seen hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving in the European Union, has created a solid platform for the National Front’s anti-immigration policies.
A grouping of right-wing parties ranked the second, with 27 percent of the votes.
Daesh invited Marine Le Pen to celebrate the election results all together in Syria.
Trailing mainstream parties are now considering whether to withdraw their candidates from the race and urge voters to back the candidate most likely to go head-to-head with National Front. Le Pen has worked to undo its image under father and co-founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen as an anti-Semitic party under father and has lured new followers from the left, the traditional right and among young people.
IFOP POLLSTER ANALYST JEROME FOURQUET, on the expected wins for the far-right party in local elections.
Mr Sarkozy said: “We must hear and understand the deep exasperation of the French”.
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He pointed out that though fears of terrorism played a part in motivating voters to cast their ballot for the hardline anti-immigrant party, the National Front has been gaining ground for four years, fueled by concerns over economic and social issues. Sarkozy has so far refused to entertain any possibility of an alliance with the Socialists in a bid to keep the Front National out of regional councils. It denounces Europe’s open borders, what it calls the “migratory submersion” and what it claims is the corrupting influence of Islam on French civilization.
