The results, with the FN winning more than 40 per cent of the vote in some regions, left the ruling Socialists and the mainstream conservative opposition in disarray. At the other end of the country, in the sun-kissed Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region, her 26-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen was shown trailing the Republicans’ Christian Estroi, with 46 percent to his 54 percent.
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Ms Le Pen has accused the Socialist party of acting in an undemocratic fashion after it announced it was pulling out two vital regional elections, urging its supporters instead to vote for Nicolas Sarkozy’s party to thwart the National Front.
Le Pen softened her usually trenchant stance in a reach-out to left and right, saying her party represents a new way where “patriots” respect the interests of the regions and clans and “political fraud” have no place.
Le Pen, whose own party has a history tied to racism and anti-Semitism, suggested that the Republican frontrunner had gone too far. The online poll took place two days after last Sunday’s first round.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls has led the Socialist charge against the National Front – and warned Friday that its victory could sow divisions that “could lead to civil war”.
Another of the six-out-of-13 regions where the National Front topped the first round was Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine in the east where it won 36 per cent of the vote.
With a soft voice and poised demeanor, Marechal-Le Pen lambasts the nation’s top politicians, once taking the floor in parliament to castigate the prime minister’s “brainless contempt” of her party.
“The keyword will be ‘pragmatism, ‘ not ‘ideology, ‘” Marine Le Pen told a last campaign rally on Thursday evening after opinion polls showed her party’s prospects have waned since the first round and that tactical voting could keep it out of power in its key target regions.
The poll for newspaper Le Figaro and television channel LCI was conducted online 8 December with 803 respondents in both regions. Le Pen and her niece have said that they would refuse funding to interests representing a single community, a reference to Muslim groups.
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.
She walked that stance back a bit this week on iTele TV, stressing that all immigrants are expected to exchange their customs for the French way of life. He has been ostracized by daughter Marine in a family feud that at one point risked fracturing the party.
“We are supporters of… republican assimilation that makes of the French of all origins members of one community, the national community”, she said.
“She has proved she can convince…” “It is clear in that the migrant crisis, like the attacks, placed at the center of political debate issues on which the National Front is in consideration … to be stronger – immigration issues, security issues and identity issues”, stated Joel Gombin, a researcher at the Observatory for Radicalism at the Jean-Jaures Foundation, a think tank.
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“She has something hereditary, a political sense”, Lecointe said.
