The far-right French politician Marine Le Pen has announced she will stand in regional elections in December, a move that will test her popularity before the 2017 presidential vote.



The leader of the Front National party will run for election as head of the new expanded region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, which takes in a swath of north-eastern France, including several constitutuencies where the far right’s share of the vote has risen in recent years.

An OpinionWay poll on Monday predicted she would beat Socialist and traditional rightwing rivals to win the region. Le Pen’s supporters see the campaign as a way to move on from the bitter public family feud that has led her to push her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, out of the party that he co-founded four decades ago.

A strong showing in the December regional elections would boost Le Pen’s standing. But if she is defeated it could undermine her presidential bid. “I hesitated because there were two electoral campaigns that were colliding, the regional and presidential votes,” she told the news channel iTele.

At a meeting of supporters in Arras, she insisted that her party’s key concerns – including leaving the euro, addressing fundamentalist Islamism, and migration – were relevant in this northern region.

She said this area of northern France, with its high unemployment and poverty rate, was “hit even harder by all this country’s ills”. She felt there was “no time to waste. Things are deteriorating so quickly that where we can improve things, we have to act straight away”.

She said she had decided to stand “to protect the people of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, who have been neglected by the Socialist majority”.

Le Pen has made northern France her symbolic heartland, serving as a councillor in Hénin-Beaumont, a small, depressed former coalmining town in the northern rust belt, which was struggling with high unemployment, factory closures and a history of political corruption.

After Le Pen won 17.9% of the vote in the last presidential elections in 2012, the Front National topped the poll in the European elections last year, calling itself the “first party of France”.

In the local departmental elections this year the party built on its new grassroots base, which Le Pen sees as the foundation stone to her presidential bid. Opinion polls predict she will make it to the second round of the presidential election in 2017, but not win it.

Le Pen’s 25-year-old niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, announced in May she would stand in regional elections in the south of France, replacing her grandfather Jean-Marie, who stepped down from the ticket during his feud with his daughter.

