France’s far-right National Front political party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen (right) and Stephane Ravier, FN’s political party candidate for the Marseille municipal elections, attend a news conference after the results in the first round of local elections in Marseille yesterday. The FN made gains in a number of towns in the first round of local elections on Sunday.

By Clare Byrne/DPA/Paris

The results of the first round of France’s municipal election last weekend confirmed the entrenchment of the far-right National Front in the political landscape.
After a decade’s absence from local politics the party made a triumphant return to French towns and villages, topping the vote in no less than 18 municipalities.
The party’s most eye-catching breakthrough was in Avignon, home of the papacy in the 14th century and venue of one of Europe’s biggest theatre festivals.
FN candidate Philippe Lottiaux fell short of the outright majority required to become mayor at the first round, but his short lead over his nearest rival from the ruling Socialist Party had the arts community running scared.
The director of the Festival d’Avignon, Olivier Py, said the festival would have “no other solution” but to decamp from the city if Lottiaux won Sunday’s run-off vote. “I don’t see myself working with a National Front city hall,” he said.
Py’s threat was widely dismissed as unactionable, not least because the festival owes part of its prestige to having the Popes’ Palace as its top venue.
But it shone a light on the fears that still hang over the prospect of the anti-immigration, anti-Europe FN being in charge, despite the progress made by Marine Le Pen in de-demonising the party.
Those fears go back to the mid-1990s, when the FN, under Le Pen’s former paratrooper father Jean-Marie, last made a foray into local politics. The party won four towns - but the mayors’ hardline approach, especially in the towns of Vitrolles and Toulon, sat uneasily with voters, who eventually chased them from office.
In Vitrolles, librarians who strayed from the mayor’s line on what she considered acceptable reading material were sidelined. In Toulon, the town hall cut subsidies to associations that worked with people of immigrant origin. All four towns prioritised folklore ahead of contemporary culture in their budgets.
This time round FN candidates are under orders to avoid ideology.
“They’re campaigning on roads, on small traders, local employment, to avoid scaring people,” Sylvain Crepon, a researcher specialised on the FN told Le Monde newspaper.
Yesterday, a caller to a radio phone-in programme asked Le Pen if the FN would ban books it considered subversive from municipal libraries.
“No, three times no, ten times no! The libraries in our towns will have no books removed. They may even see their catalogues boosted,” she assured.
Another caller wondered whether an FN mayor would wed a same-sex couple, under a new gay marriage law that the FN and other opposition parties vehemently opposed.
Le Pen again rushed to ease voters’ concerns. FN mayors, she said, would not shirk their “republican duty.”
The party’s top candidates also talk a moderate line.
“No, we’re not going to demand visas to enter the town or put up barbed wire!,” Steve Briois, the discreet salesman from the former coal-mining town of Henin-Beaumont, who became the first of the new crop of FN mayors last week, declared.
In Avignon, Lottiaux said he was “saddened” by the suggestion that he would try put the party’s stamp on the theatre festival. Such practises, he said, “belonged to the past.”
“What characterises the FN, under Marine Le Pen, is its institutionalisation. The party has gained increasing credibility, increasing legitimacy and is moving away from its far-right image in the eyes of voters,” Gilles Ivaldi, a political sciences researcher at the University of Nice, said.
Ivaldi predicted the FN could win six more towns on Sunday, giving it a total of seven mayors and around 1,600 councillors, up from a current count of around 60.
The party has been boosted by fierce disillusionment with President Francois Hollande’s record on the economy, particularly his failure to curb record unemployment. The towns where the FN is tipped for victory have some of the country’s highest rates of joblessness.
But the party still has a hill to climb to translate its standing on the national stage - where it is the third-largest political force - at local level. The party only managed to muster enough candidates to run lists in around 600 out of some 36,000 constituencies.
For Ivaldi, the party is still dogged by the past, despite the successes of what he sees as Le Pen’s “window-dressing.”
“There has been no fundamental break with the past on the big ideological themes, such as national preference, state authority, immigration, the death sentence, leaving the European Union, criticising elites,” he said.
“The party of Marine Le Pen is not fundamentally different from the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen.”