The elections came as France is under a state of emergency just three weeks after Isil-linked terrorists killed 130 in Paris.
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Marine Le Pen’s FN party was ahead in at least six of France’s 13 regions, with exit polls showing the party attracted more than 30% of the vote – eight points ahead of President François Hollande’s governing Socialist Party.
Mr Hollande has seen his personal ratings surge on the back of his hardline approach to security since the Paris carnage, but his party is being punished for a jobless total of almost 3-million.
A second round of run-off voting will happen this Sunday, and frightened left-of-center voters may shift their votes to the Republicans, the center-right party that finished second, to block the National Front from taking power.
Marine Le Pen attributes her party’s high scores to the nature of the political class, and the system it defends.
Victory would not only put the party at the head of a regional government for the first time, but would also give Le Pen a springboard for her presidential bid in 2017.
The FN has been steadily gaining traction in France over the past few years as Le Pen has maintained its strident nationalism, while purging some of the party’s more extreme elements.
Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls and the traditional-leaning national company lobby issued a public appeal to stop the march toward success of the National Front. The elder Le Pen was kicked out of the National Front earlier this year, amid a public spat with his 47-year-old daughter over a number of inflammatory statements on the Holocaust and other topics. The Socialists, who finished third, said they will pull their candidates from two key regions to encourage tactical voting against the National Front.
“After the November 13 attacks we saw a clear increase in support for the National Front”, Ifop pollster analyst Jerome Fourquet said.
The FN, founded by Marine’s father Jean-Marie in 1972, has a long history of scandal.
The Socialists said on Sunday that they would withdraw from December 13 second-round runoffs in the north and southeast of France, where they ended the first round in third place, in hope of keeping the FN from winning.
Though the power of French regions is mostly limited to infrastructure spending and tourism promotion, running a region provides both local bases and national platforms for the victors.
Socialist leaders will begin talks after the first results come in on Sunday to decide whether to withdraw from some second-round battles, while the Republicans’ strategy meeting is set for Monday.
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Marion Maréchal Le Pen, niece of the party leader, last week said Muslims could not be French because they rejected France’s “customs and morals” rooted in Christianity.
