France’s far-right National Front has hailed its strong showing in the country’s municipal elections as a major victory, but the party may still have some way to go to establish itself as a serious force at local level.

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Provisional results show the anti-immigration, anti-EU party led by Marine Le Pen will take control of 11 towns and is on track to claim more than 1,200 municipal council seats nationwide – the FN’s best ever showing in local elections.

The FN’s victories included the towns of Béziers, Le Pontet, Frejus, Beaucaire, Le Luc, Camaret-sur-Aigues and Cogolin in the south, and Villers-Cotteret and Hayange in the north.

It had already won power in the northern town of Henin-Beaumont in last week’s first round of voting.

It also won the 7th district of France’s second biggest city, Marseille. With a population of 150,000, the district represents the FN’s biggest victory of the elections.

Le Pen declared the results a major breakthrough for the party at grass roots level. "We have moved onto a new level," Le Pen claimed. "There is now a third major political force in our country.”

But others claim the election results are not quite the game-changing success for which Le Pen had hoped.

“If we look at things objectively, the FN remains a relatively weak force at municipal level,” Jean-Yves Dormagen, professor of political science at Montpellier 1 University, told French daily "Libération".

FN loses out on key targets

The biggest town taken by the FN was Béziers – where the winning candidate, Robert Ménard, is not an FN member but was backed by the party – with a population of 70,000.

But there were no victories on the scale of Toulon, the city the FN took in its previous most successful municipal elections in 1995.

“[The FN] won mostly small or medium-sized towns and the number of towns won remains very low compared to the 980 towns and cities with over 10,000 inhabitants,” said Dormagen. “In fact, these victories are the least you would expect for a party that regularly polls between 15 percent and 20 percent in national elections.”

The FN also lost out in several towns and cities it had been targeting, including Avignon in southern France, which was taken by the Socialists in a major upset for the conservative right.

In Forbach, in eastern France, the party’s number two, Florian Philippot, was defeated despite having led the vote in the first round.

There was also defeats in Perpignan, where the party’s vice president Louis Aliot had been standing, and the small southern town of Saint Gilles, where another high-profile FN candidate, Gilbert Collard, was running.

The biggest challenge for the FN now will be proving it has the ability to run the towns it has won - something the party has struggled with in the past.

Le Pen was confident, however, that her party would prove doubters wrong. "We will destroy this idea that the FN represents some sort of threat to the Republic,” she said. “Our elected candidates will show that they are good mayors."

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