Marine Le Pen's National Front Leads in First Round of French Regional Elections

No surprise there.

At the Wall Street Journal, "National Front Leads in First Round of French Regional Elections":

42% ! Merci ! pic.twitter.com/gbHKWidonJ

— Marion Le Pen (@Marion_M_Le_Pen) December 6, 2015

PARIS—France’s far-right National Front was ahead in the first round of regional elections, early exit polls showed Sunday, positioning the anti-immigration party to win control of several French regions in a second vote a week from now.

Three weeks after the terror attacks that left 130 dead in Paris, Marine Le Pen’s National Front took 30.6% of the mainland France vote, according to an IFOP-Fiducial exit poll. That marked a surge from the last comparable elections in 2010, when the party won only 11.4% of the first-round vote.

President François Hollande’s Socialist party and allies came in third place with 22.7% behind Les Républicains—the center-right party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy—and its allies who garnered 27%.

The first-round results highlight the emergence of Ms. Le Pen’s National Front as a third force in French politics, capable of luring mainstream voters. With 18 months to go to presidential and legislative elections, the results also underline the fading momentum of Mr. Hollande’s Socialists and other leftist groups, who currently preside over all but one of France’s mainland regions.

The strong first-round score doesn't guarantee the National Front will take control of one of France’s regions. But their chances are better than in other local votes because the regional elections don’t necessarily end in runoffs. That means several parties can get through to the second round of voting, making it difficult for mainstream parties to unite behind one anti-National Front candidate in a runoff, as they have in the past.

The party that takes the largest share of the vote in the second round next Sunday will get a bonus of 25% of the seats at the regional assembly, which almost guarantees majority control of the region.

The strength of the National Front in the first-round vote will force the mainstream parties to scramble in the coming days to find ways to block the National Front in regions where it is ahead. Prime Minister Manuel Valls has already said that his Socialist party and Mr. Sarkozy’s Les Républicains should prepare to bury decades of rivalry and merge their lists of candidates for the second-round vote for the regional assemblies. Alternatively, one party could withdraw from the race.

The National Front had already chalked up successes in local elections in recent years after Ms. Le Pen cracked down on the anti-Semitic rhetoric that kept the National Front on the margins of French politics under the stewardship of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Mr. Le Pen’s expulsion from the party in August crowned that makeover.

But the National Front has continued to endorse anti-immigration and anti European policies, combined with calls for hard-line security measures. That enabled Ms. Le Pen to bolster support after the Paris attacks by castigating Mr. Hollande for not implementing soon enough the policies she has long espoused...

Marine LePen's niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, is expected to take 43 percent of the vote in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.

More at the Telegraph UK, "Marion Maréchal-Le Pen: The New Wonder-Girl Of France's Far-Right."