Marion Maréchal-Le Pen is waging an intensive campaign — and it pays off, polls suggest | BERTRAND LANGLOIS/AFP/Getty Poll: Marion Le Pen headed for victory The survey raises the prospect of a double regional victory for the anti-immigration National Front party.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the granddaughter of ex-National Front party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, is on course to win a December local election in southeastern France.

An Odoxa survey published Sunday showed the 25-year-old National Front politician winning 37 percent of the final-round vote, versus 34 percent for her main center-right rival, Nice mayor Christian Estrosi, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region.

Meanwhile her aunt, party chief Marine Le Pen, maintains a strong lead over both left- and right-wing rivals in the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais region.

The poll results raise the prospect of a double regional victory for the anti-immigration National Front party, which claims that it could prevail in as many as six regions.

Winning the presidency of even two regions would be a major achievement for the National Front, both symbolically and in terms establishing itself as a local power broker.

France reshuffled its administrative map this year, reducing its number of metropolitan regions to 13 from 22. The newly elected presidents of regions will hold greater sway than previously over appointments and budgets, which in 2015 totaled more than €2 billion each in the PACA and Nord-Pas-de-Calais regions.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, often described as the "darling" of far-right patriarch Jean-Marie, is conducting an intensive local campaign focused on immigration, security and the idea of protecting France's identity.

She has maintained her ties to Jean-Marie throughout a bitter family feud with Marine and met with him at the family residence near Paris last Tuesday despite his exclusion from the party in August.

Jean-Marie, who was kicked out the National Front for saying he still believed the Nazi gas chambers were a mere detail of history, maintains considerable support in southern France. Marion wants to enlist his support as well as that of his allies to increase her chances of winning.

While Marine has publicly severed ties with her father, she continues to borrow money from his finance firm, Cotelec, which acts as a bank for the National Front.

She even borrowed money for her regional election campaign, party treasurer Wallerand de St Just told POLITICO.

Unlike her niece, Marine Le Pen is not conducting an intensive local campaign. Instead she is using the regional elections to drum up support and raise her profile ahead of a presidential election in 2017, which remains her priority.

The "darling" of patriarch Jean-Marie is conducting a local campaign focused on immigration, security and French identity.

A rival in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais race, Europe-Ecologie les Verts (EELV) candidate Sandrine Rousseau, told POLITICO that Le Pen declined invitations to participate in election debates on local TV and spent most of her time outside the region trying to boost support for other candidates, including her Vice President Florian Philippot who is running in the Alsace-Lorraine-Champagne-Ardenne region.

President Francois Hollande's socialist party fears a disaster in the December elections.

In a referendum Sunday, Hollande's party asked left-wing voters if they would accept merging the candidate lists of the socialist party with those of the EELV and the far-left Parti de Gauche. Presenting unified left-wing election lists would increase their chances of prevailing over the Right and far-right in several regions.

However, the chiefs of both rival left-wing parties have rejected the socialist party's overtures. Rousseau said that her party could not associate itself with the socialists, who have traditionally held sway in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, due to numerous corruption scandals.

"If we join with their list, we're getting on board the Titanic," Rousseau said.