DOUAI, France — Call her the welfare state’s Joan of Arc.

As far-right leader Marine Le Pen seeks election in depressed northern France, her message to voters boils down to: Choose me, I’ll restore France’s social protections and save you from American-led globalization.

It’s a new political brew for the National Front that’s helping the party make unprecedented inroads in regional politics, and become an increasingly serious contender at the national level.

Founded by Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party rose in the late 20th century by peddling anti-immigrant rhetoric along with a dose of Reaganite free market philosophy. But in recent years the Front has moved firmly into terrain once occupied by French communists, the ruling Socialists and other leftists.

It appeals to the working man’s frustrations with economic stagnation, the changing world and the enduring hold on French political life of urban, well-educated and incestuous elites. The Front’s social politics are conservative and its economics are firmly anything but liberal.

The message is geared well for this region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, home to old mining and industrial towns such as Wattrelos and Douai. This historically socialist bastion has high unemployment and scaled-back public services, leaving locals feeling abandoned by the central government. Voters here are moving away from the traditional representatives of the left, who are discredited by decades of economic decline and various corruption scandals.

‘Save Us'

Le Pen is here to build her coalition, and start her long march to power in Paris from France’s depressed and angry provinces.

“The basic problem is that the state no longer protects you,” Le Pen told a group in Wattrelos, a town on the French border with Belgium where the jobless rate was 17.9 percent in 2011, according to the most recent statistics. “So I am committed to making the region take the place of the state … a protective region that also takes care of the neediest.”

In regional elections on December 6-13, Le Pen hopes to win the presidency of the regional council of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. A victory would be a huge political prize for her, giving her party its first provincial seat, nominal control over €2 billion and possibly a better springboard for her 2017 presidential bid.

Polls place Le Pen in the lead against center-right and Socialist contenders. What’s more, Le Pen’s niece Marion-Maréchal in southern France and the Front’s Vice President Florian Philippot in the east, also stand decent chances of winning in their respective regions. Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Sunday called the prospect of a triple victory for the FN, as the party is known by its French abbreviation, a “tragedy.”

French voters are less sure. A TNS Sofres poll published by Le Point magazine last week showed that 52 percent of respondents would not be bothered if Le Pen won in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

Part of the increased tolerance may be explained by Le Pen’s decision to exclude her father from the party for making racist and xenophobic comments.

The growing acceptance of Le Pen also may be due to her embrace of a caring, protectionist discourse that borrows as much from socialism as the statist right.

“We’ve also stabilized the debt load, and put town employees back to work thanks to job training programs.”

In the regional race, the compassionate tone sets her apart from Xavier Bertrand, a former labor minister under Nicolas Sarkozy who rails against absenteeism in the civil service and uses the campaign slogan “Our region at work.”

Back in July, Bertrand told POLITICO that Le Pen was asking voters to resign themselves to a life on the dole.

In response, Le Pen tells voters here: It’s not your fault if you need help.

“In this region people are brave, hard working,” she went on in Wattrelos, to murmurs of approval from the crowd. “If there was work they would take the work…. But there is no work.”

War on ‘immigrationists’

While the National Front champions welfare in the old socialist north, its policies are not fixed nationally. Marion-Maréchal Le Pen peddles a more socially and economically liberal agenda in the south, and Marine Le Pen has been forced to tone down her anti-euro rhetoric nationally to avoid scaring off center-right voters.

The same goes for Islam and immigration. Though tough on migrants, Le Pen insists that her party is open to French Muslims so long as they put citizenship before faith. That contrasts with the Front in southern France, where officials argue that Islam can be a threat to the country’s Christian identity.

Le Pen’s campaign proposals aim to offer voters what her campaign manager Bruno Bilde described as a “shield against the central state.”

Among other things, she promises to open health centers in small towns; expand apprenticeship programs; launch a university for arts and crafts; lean on the central state to keep post offices and other state services running; and press the regional council to prioritize local business over foreign ones when placing public orders.

With regard to the migrant crisis currently playing out in the nearby port city of Calais, where thousands of refugees have congregated in the hopes of reaching the U.K., Le Pen vows to leverage her regional role to stop the state from “stealing from the poor to give to foreigners.” That would mean cutting regional funding to non-profit groups that conduct what she calls “immigrationist” work by encouraging migrants to stay in France.

“We’re going to cut all funding,” she told a small group of journalists during a campaign stop in Douai. “Calais is totally out of control.”

Opponents counter that her proposals are fantastical.

The pledge to prioritize local firms in procurement tenders, for example, goes against European rules on free competition for public tenders across the bloc. (Le Pen says she will simply “go around” such rules.)

During a brutal live TV debate, Bertrand accused Le Pen of having “zero solutions.” The National Front president shot back that his party was to blame for the unemployment crisis.

Advancing slowly through a crowd in Douai last Saturday, Le Pen spent hours signing autographs, posing for pictures and listening to appeals for personal help from locals who called her by her first name, Marine.

Some acted as though Le Pen had already won the local election. One woman stopped Le Pen at a cramped junction and implored her to help her brother, a farmer facing mounting losses.

“You must save us,” said the woman, who asked to be named as Marianne. “We’re suffocating here.”

Others who turned out to meet the National Front president said they had always previously voted for left-wing candidates.

“I come from a long line of Socialists, but all of that is over,” said Achiles Larue, 65, a retired butcher who said he planned to back Le Pen. “We need a change, because we’re tired of the way things are going.”

Asked if he thought the National Front had the maturity as a party to run the region, Larue added: “That makes me laugh. Look at the officials in the other parties, they are certainly no better.”

The Front’s local results

For the first time in many years, the National Front can point to actual experience in running towns to rebut charges of amateurism. Since the party won 11 town halls in municipal elections last year it has imposed a local government model focused on sound management of town finances.

FN mayors have copped criticism over politically-motivated decisions to cut funding to town associations that offer after-school activities for children. Courts have also batted back some local decrees, such as an anti-vagrancy order in the FN-run town of Hénin-Beaumont, as unjustified.

But so far, on the whole, locals like their approach. An Ifop poll in March showed that 73 percent of residents in FN towns approved of its management. In the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Le Pen can point to the town hall of Hénin-Beaumont, led by FN Mayor Steeve Briois, as proof of the party’s probity with local finances.

“We have cut taxes four times since we were elected,” said Jean-Richard Sulzer, an economic adviser to Le Pen and budget manager in Hénin-Beaumont. “We’ve also stabilized the debt load, and put town employees back to work thanks to job training programs.”

Over decades of local rule, Sulzer said that the leftist leadership in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais had become an in-club that rewarded sympathetic business owners with public contracts, often at inflated prices. Poor local management had left many towns saddled with toxic debt, leaving them unable to stop a spiral of job losses, business closures and declining tax revenue.

Furthermore, the spectacle of Hénin-Beaumont’s former Socialist mayor, Gérard Dallongeville, facing trial and conviction in 2013 to three years’ jail for embezzling town funds had deepened suspicion of the Socialist party.

“That’s what lost the Socialists,” he said. “Now we have a region where the Socialists are collapsing everywhere.”

Currently, Socialist candidate Pierre de Saintignon is expected to gather just 15 percent of votes in the election’s first round, versus 46 percent for Le Pen and 29 percent for Bertrand, according to a BVA poll published on October 23. A relative unknown (Saintignon’s Wikipedia page was briefly deleted because editors argued he did not meet the criteria to have one), Saintignon was nominated as the party’s candidate only after Martine Aubry, mayor of Lille and a Socialist bigwig, made clear she would not run.

Saintignon, an elected official in Lille and executive with the Darty chain, is unbowed, convinced that his reputation with locals will help him score better than Bertrand.

“I’m the only one who is interested in this region,” he told the DailyNord website. “Both of these candidates are working for the presidential election and I can understand that leaves people not wanting to vote. My goal is nothing else but the region.”

Le Pen says her adversary in the race is neither the Socialist party nor Sarkozy’s “Les Républicains,” but both. It’s a hybrid bogeyman she refers to as the “UMPS” — blending the abbreviations of both the mainstream right and left parties in France — that she holds responsible for all of France’s troubles, from the migration crisis to unemployment and crime.

She is right in at least one respect. If her rivals are to defeat Le Pen, they will have to agree on supporting a candidate from the other’s party in the event of a second-round runoff against her. “We’ll see if they can agree on that,” said Le Pen, dismissively.