It was in a down-at-heel town in the Front National heartlands of northern France, far from the despised Parisian elite, that Marine Le Pen chose to celebrate the election victory that has brought her just one step away from becoming the country’s next president.

“What is at stake here is the survival of France,” she told a wildly cheering crowd after the results were announced of round one of the most unpredictable and the most high-stakes election in decades.

She was speaking in a sports hall on the edge of the town of Henin-Beaumont, a couple of hours drive north of Paris in the French “rustbelt”, where the coal mines closed long ago and the factories have moved to Eastern Europe or Asia.