Far-right party poised to win two regions for first time as it reaps electoral advantage from France’s fear of Islamists and migrants

Looking out across hundreds of flag-waving supporters at a rally in the northern city of Lille, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen told the crowd that the Front National was the only party that could reassure France in this moment of “infinite sadness”.



The deaths of 130 people in the Paris terrorist attacks were, she claimed, the result of government inaction, lies, and, above all, its “crazy, undiscerning immigration policy”. The Socialist president, François Hollande, who had declared war on terrorism, was “a war chief who hasn’t even got the measure of the enemy!” she boomed. Only 10 months after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Paris kosher supermarket left 17 dead, the government had failed to protect French people from another attack and was “more than just responsible” she cried.

The crowd stamped their feet and roared support, chanting “Hollande resign! Hollande resign!”

The political fallout from the Paris terror attacks looks likely to shake France’s Socialist government this Sunday when the country votes in the first round of key regional elections. Even though Hollande has seen his popularity rise since the attacks, this has not helped his wider party and its candidates. Instead, it is Le Pen’s Front National that stands to make the most gains at the ballot box.

The Front National was already on course for a historically high vote in the regional elections before the attacks. It has painstakingly built a local grassroots base, while Le Pen drove to “detoxify” the party and move away from the racist, jackbooted, antisemitic imagery of the past. But the party’s hardline positions on Islam and immigration remain unchanged, and since the Paris attacks the Front National’s key concerns – the migrant crisis, security and radicalisation – have become the main talking points in France, personally benefiting Le Pen.

She has made political capital from the fact that Hollande’s response to the attacks included hardline security measures – such as border controls, more armed police and revoking the citizenship of convicted terrorists with dual nationality who were born in France – that she had long championed herself. Le Pen said Hollande’s measures were “picked from the saddlebag of the Front National” and were a personal “tribute” to her.

More than half of French voters say the Paris attacks will not change their vote in the regional elections. But the far-right’s already strong position has been reinforced and, with the abstention rate expected to be high, its voters are more galvanised to turn out to vote.

The party is tipped to take control of at least two of France’s 13 mainland regions for the first time. Le Pen could win leadership of the new, expanded region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie in the north, the poorest region in mainland France, with a population of 6 million. The area, hit by the closure of heavy industry, has traditionally been a bastion of the left, with above-average unemployment and poverty rates.

But Le Pen has over several years built her own symbolic heartland there, serving as a local councillor in Hénin-Beaumont, a small, depressed former coal-mining town in the northern rust belt. Now with the issue of refugees and migrants in Calais also weighing on public opinion in the region, Le Pen is hoping to use this northern laboratory as a springboard for her presidential ambitions in 2017.

Her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a rising star within the party, is also predicted to win control of the Socialist-run southern region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, which includes some of the richest areas in France.

In Lille, Lilie Bultez, who runs an online business, said Le Pen had been warning of the dangers of radical Islam, immigration and guns on French housing estates for decades and the attacks showed she “was right all along”.

Bultez said: “She was the only politician who predicted what is happening today. These attacks should have been avoided. The president is now telling us to wave flags and be patriotic, when our ‘red, white and blue’ stance was for years called racist. We’re not racists, we’re realists.”

She also felt a Le Pen vote would “save Calais”, where thousands of migrants are living in the state-sanctioned makeshift slum known as the “new jungle”.

Chantal Delbarre, 67, a mother of six, said: “Everyone is afraid of more attacks at any time. Marine Le Pen predicted this and it’s only her who can save us.”

Pierre Mathiot, a politics professor at Lille’s Sciences Po university, said: “The Front National vote was already high in this region, but the migrant crisis and the Calais issue, and now the November 13 attacks, are extremely favourable to that vote.”

He added: “When you look at polling before and after the November 13 [attacks], it is only the Front National that is rising.” He said Le Pen’s success in the north was down to her long-standing local base, the difficult socio-economic conditions and the local left, who had been in power for so long that they had lost the habit of “being in political competition” and failed to counter the far-right.

The local paper La Voix du Nord this week took the unprecedented step of running a front-page campaign warning of the dangers of the Front National. The paper argued that this frontier area, which relies heavily on international ties to the UK, Belgium and beyond, did not fit the party’s drive to close borders. Artists and cultural figures in the region around Lille, which is one of France’s cultural hotspots, have also warned against the Front National. But the party’s poll ratings in the northern region continue to rise.

The Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, recently warned that the Front National was “antisemitic and racist” and any electoral gains in the regional elections would be a national “drama”.

Le Pen uses this to her advantage, arguing that the political elite are ganging up against her. When she recently went on trial for hate speech for the first time – after likening Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation – she said the government was persecuting her. The judges’ verdict in the case will come after the regional elections are over.

But Jéremy Vanhoye, 29, a delivery driver in northern France, said: “Today, the Front National is a major party like any other. The right and left hasn’t worked. The FN is our only alternative.”