France headed to the polls on Sunday for a key regional vote, three weeks after jihadist attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead.
Around 44 million people are eligible to vote, with France under tight security and in a state of emergency following the country’s worst-ever terror attacks, which have thrust the FN’s anti-immigration and often Islamophobic message to the fore.
First projections are expected at 19:00 GMT.
The leader of the National Front (FN), Marine Le Pen, is running in the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region – once a bastion of the left – while her 25-year-old niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen is a candidate in the vast southeastern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region.
While President François Hollande has seen his personal ratings surge as a result of his hardline approach since the Paris attacks, his Socialist party has not enjoyed a similar boost.
Victory for the FN would not only put the party at the head of a regional government for the first time, but would also give Marine Le Pen a springboard for her presidential bid in 2017.
The FN – whose leaders have repeatedly made links between terrorism and immigration – has been rising in popularity since the carnage in Paris on November 13.
When it emerged that at least two of the attackers had entered Europe posing as migrants, it allowed the FN to trumpet a message of, “We told you so.”
Any FN election triumph could be undermined if the leftist and centrist parties are able to forge an alliance. But so far the Socialists have not been able to unify with the Radical Left Party; the Socialists therefore remain at risk of falling into third place behind parties on the right.
Socialist leaders will begin talks after the first results come in on Sunday to decide if they will pull out of some of the second-round battles, with former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s Les Républicains party (formerly the UMP) meeting the following day to agree their strategy.
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Credit: (FRANCE 24 with AFP)