Reuters/AFP/Paris

France’s mainstream political parties were scrambling yesterday for a way to stop the rise of the far-right National Front (FN) after its historic first-round lead in regional elections.
Boosted by fears over the Islamic State (IS) attacks that killed 130 people in Paris on November 13, Marine Le Pen’s party secured 27.7% of the vote nationally.
It came first in six of 13 regions in Sunday’s vote, its best showing ever.
The anti-Europe, anti-immigration party has been gaining ground for years among voters frustrated by the government’s failure to tackle unemployment, fearful of immigration and disillusioned by mainstream politics.
Riding a wave of euroscepticism and anti-immigrant feeling which has brought far-right parties to prominence across Europe, the breakthrough bolsters Le Pen’s position as a serious contender for the 2017 presidential election.
Some 16% of those who voted for the FN said they had changed their voting intentions after the November 13 attacks, an exit poll published yesterday said.
Sixty-eight per cent said their aim had been to punish the unpopular Socialist government of President Francois Hollande, the poll by Ifop and Fiducial for iTELE, Paris Match and Sud Radio said.
The outcome also exposed fault lines within both the country’s main traditional political groupings over the right tactics to confront the National Front in the decisive second round of the regional elections next Sunday.
To try to make sure Le Pen does not win in the final round, France’s ruling Socialist Party decided to pull its candidates out of three regions where it came third, telling supporters there to back Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative Republicans.
But many in President Francois Hollande’s party are unhappy about giving up all regional representation across swathes of the country, and yesterday Jean-Pierre Masseret, who leads the Socialists in the eastern region, resisted calls from his party chief to pull out.
“We are standing fast. We think the best way to oppose the National Front is by taking our seats in the regional assembly. That is where we can best push back the National Front, by being the opposition,” he said on BFMTV.
Sarkozy has ruled out a similar tactic by his own party, but some of his allies believe he should copy the Socialists’ strategy.
“When you are third, you pull out. You create a front against the destructive force because now is the time to rebuild,” said former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who is from the centrist rank of the party.
Long the pariah of French politics, the FN has won greater respectability since Marine took over from her father Jean-Marie as head of the party in 2011.
While the party won 11.42% of the vote in the first round of the last regional elections in 2010, it managed 25.25% in the first round of elections to the smaller departments in March.
Le Pen senior was thwarted in his bid for the presidency in 2002 when the Socialist Party used a similar tactic to the one they deployed yesterday.
Its own candidate, Lionel Jospin, was knocked out in round one, so it urged supporters to prevent a Le Pen win by voting for Conservative Jacques Chirac, who won with more than 80% of the vote.
Yesterday Marine Le Pen was careful not to claim victory, and also denounced the Socialists’ tactics as anti-democratic.
“We’re not home and dry yet, especially since the election is being run in an unfair way,” she told French radio RTL. “To pull out a candidate on the second round is rather unfair. Today, they’re twisting the arm of the French, of the left. Are they going to accept being insulted, despised? We’ll see.”
Le Pen said her party now “embodied the alternative choice”.
“French people have had enough – in one election after another, they have shown their confidence in the National Front,” she said.
The National Front won 27.73% of the first-round vote nationwide, according to final official figures.
The Republicans and its allies won 26.65% and the Socialists 23.12%.
Le Pen won 40.64% of the vote in the Nord-Pas-de Calais region she contested and her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen scored 40.55% in Provence-Alpes-Cote D’Azur in the south.
The abstention rate was 50.9% nationally.