Since then is seems more, rather than less, likely she will top the first round of France’s presidential elections in 2017.
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French far-right National Front Party leader, Marine Le Pen, delivers a speech after the first round of regional elections, Sunday, Dec. 6, 2015, in Henin-Beaumont, northern France. Boosted by the fear which followed Islamic State attacks that killed 130 people in Paris on November 13th, Marine Le Pen’s party secured 27.7 per cent of the vote nationally.
Recent polls suggest a strong rise in support for the National Front, despite President Francois Hollande’s recovery in opinion polls since the Paris attacks.
Early polls from Agence France-Presse predicted that Le Pen won at least 40 percent of the votes in Picardie. The Socialist party is putting up a “barricade” to the far-right where it is far behind, party chief Jean-Christophe Cambadelis said.
She hailed her party’s success on Twitter, saying both the PS and Republicans “are crumbling” and “the French people are sick and exhausted of that old political world”.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the co-founder and former leader of the party, celebrated the party’s ” historical” achievements in the elections Sunday by tweeting a video of Conservative party candidate Christian Estrosi wearing a skullcap and dancing with Jewish men.
The main parties on the right and left now face hard decisions on whether to strike an agreement to try to block the FN. The Socialists, who finished third, said they will pull their candidates from two key regions to encourage tactical voting against the National Front.
It came first in six of 13 regions in Sunday’s vote, its best-ever result.
In the 2002 presidential election, Ms Le Pen’s father reached the second round, but in the end got nowhere near the presidency.
France’s chief rabbi, Haim Korsia, called for a “civic uprising” of voters in the second round “to breathe life into democracy…in these particularly troubled times for the nation”.
Marine Le Pen told supporters it was a “magnificent result” which proved the FN was “without contest the first party of France”.
“There is a surly anti-establishment mood in France, of which the National Front- a quintessential anti-establishment party – is taking full advantage”, Hugh Schofield, the BBC’s Paris Correspondent, recently wrote.
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For his part, Sarkozy already announced after his party’s second-place showing that its candidates nationwide would not be joining forces with other parties or withdrawing from the race. He said a victory for National Front ideas “would dramatically aggravate France’s situation and create conditions of unsafe disorder”.
