Marine Le Pen’s party gets warm welcome in provinces as it is expected to come top in the first round of this weekend’s local elections

In the picturesque Picardy town of Villers-Cotterêts, Sylvie Delpierre, an estate agency manager, is smiling with pride. Since the election of a far-right Front National mayor last year, she feels many homebuyers leaving the edgy Paris suburbs in search of semi-rural calm are often “happy and relieved” to hear who is running the town. “It seems more serene: there’s less tension, we see more police patrols and local taxes have gone down,” she said.

Delpierre, 50, once felt voting Front National was “taboo and utterly frowned upon”. It had been “inconceivable” to tell her parents that she always secretly voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the gruff ex-paratrooper and founder of the party, who, she said had been historically “attacked on all sides” – his party criticised for neo-Nazi links and antisemitism, and he himself convicted for contesting crimes against humanity after saying the Nazi occupation of France was not “particularly inhumane”.

But now she believes Marine Le Pen, the founder’s daughter and new far-right leader, has mass appeal. “Only the Front National can fix the economy and restore France’s image on the world stage,” she said. “Marine Le Pen has presence – she’s our Angela Merkel, a woman who can impose things.”

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As France votes in the first round of local elections this weekend, the government has expressed concern at the seemingly unstoppable rise of the FN. The nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-Europe party – which wants to leave the euro, restore the death penalty, curb immigration and favour French people over immigrants when giving out benefits – is expected to come top in the first round, taking around 30% of the national vote, ahead of the rightwing UMP and far ahead of the governing Socialists.

This marks a significant change. Traditionally, the FN represented a national protest vote that has very little grassroots presence or local organisation. Now it is becoming rooted across the country. And its new local bases are the foundation stones of Le Pen’s bid for the presidency in 2017.

The FN already bills itself as the “first party of France” after it topped the poll in the European elections last year. After municipal elections last year, it now has 11 mayors and over 1,500 municipal councillors – higher than its former glory days in the 1990s when it had four mayors.

Polls show Le Pen could knock out a rightwing or leftwing rival and get to the final round of 2017’s presidential race – repeating the shock success of her father in 2002. But although most maintain she could never gain enough support to reach the Elysée palace, the prime minister, Manuel Valls, recently said: “I fear for my country.” Le Pen, he warned, could actually win the next presidential election.

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This department of L’Aisne in Picardy has come to symbolise Le Pen’s rise and is likely to see FN’s highest vote this weekend. It has all the ingredients for a large far-right turnout: 14% unemployment that is far higher than the national average, factory closures, people struggling to make ends meet and a substantial working-class population who are not very politicised.

This corner of northern France is semi-rural, with cereal and beetroot fields stretching across the plains, but one third of industrial jobs have disappeared in the past 15 years and many workers commute to jobs around Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport. The party calls it “the France of the forgotten”. It was here in the forest surrounding Villers-Cotterêts that the Kouachi brothers, the terrorist gunmen who attacked the magazine Charlie Hebdo in January, went on the run and disappeared for a night before re-emerging to take a hostage at a printing firm nearby. Picardy also recently hit the news for the arrests of members of a violent criminal gang of extreme-right skinheads.

Franck Briffaut, the FN mayor of Villers-Cotterêts and a candidate for a council seat in this weekend’s local elections, said his party’s mayors were the “avant garde” of a new grassroots movement. The former soldier, who once served with French UN troops in Lebanon, joined the party in 1977 and was elected mayor last year: “People were distrustful at first, but now they see we’re credible and as competent as any other party to run a town.” He said his party’s progress towards power was “inexorable on all levels: local, parliament and the presidency”.

One of Briffaut’s controversial early measures was to cancel the town’s commemorations of the abolition of slavery. This caused consternation, including from the president, François Hollande, because Villers-Cotterêts was home to the revolutionary General Dumas, born to a French nobleman and an African slave, and father to the writer Alexandre Dumas. Briffaut said he was glad slavery had been abolished but opposed the “permanent self-blame” that had overtaken France.



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Other FN mayors elected last year – most of whom lowered local taxes and cut grants to organisations such as human rights groups – have also sparked controversy. Robert Ménard, former head of the journalism group Reporters Sans Frontières and now mayor of Béziers in the south, introduced a curfew for under-13s, banned laundry from balconies and armed the police. But a poll this month showed that 73% of people in towns with FN mayors were satisfied with them, higher than the national rate. Nonetheless, around 58% feel their FN mayors are “sectarian”.

Also, the Front National’s scrabble to find thousands of candidates to stand as councillors in the local departmental elections this weekend has prompted criticism that the party has sometimes opted for un-vetted, geriatric or questionable representatives. Scrutiny of social media accounts reveals allegations of blatant racism, homophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism, at odds with Le Pen’s drive to “detoxify” and rebrand the party. Last month a candidate in the south-west was struck off the party list for posting antisemitic comments on Facebook. The party said candidates would face disciplinary procedures over any wrongdoing.

In Villers-Cotterêts, a retired butcher said: “The Front National vote is a protest against the traditional left and right who are seen as aloof and ineffective. I’m not tempted, but I understand life is hard and people are fed-up.” On a housing estate, one unemployed mother of two said she would vote FN because “there are too many foreigners and they get too many benefits”.

Nonna Mayer, an expert on the far right and professor at Paris’s Institute of Political Studies, said: “Those most inclined to vote Le Pen are people just above the threshold of precariousness: they have a job, some skills, may own their house or are paying for it, and are afraid to lose what they worked hard to earn – afraid to fall down the social ladder.”

Emilie, 32, another Villers-Cotterêts estate agent, said: “It’s too easy for other political parties to say the Front National is a party of fascists and racists, but that is totally wrong. We didn’t say we didn’t like foreigners, we just want people to play the game and integrate in France. Respect French law, don’t impose headscarves on us, don’t spit on the national anthem. We’re patriots.”