The far-right Front National is poised to make large gains in the final round of French local elections.



After winning only two local council seats at the last election, in 2011, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration and anti-Europe party could win up to 220 seats on Sunday, cementing the Front National’s transformation from what was once a simple national protest vote to a locally anchored movement that Le Pen hopes to use as a springboard for a presidential run in 2017.

“The Front National has now implanted itself nationwide, it has reached a level that is high, too high,” the Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, told Le Journal du Dimanche.

The election will choose 4,108 local councillors who will have limited powers over roads, schools and social services, and who will shape the political landscape in the runup to regional elections this year and the 2017 presidential race.

By midday, just over 15% of the electorate had turned out to vote, slightly down on the turnout in last week’s first round.

The vote is also a key test for Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president who heads the traditional rightwing UMP. His party, beset by debt, has been shaken by allegations of financial scandals and bitter infighting. But, in coalition with centrist parties, it is expected to top the poll and wrest a large number of local councils from the left.

According to polls, the UMP and its centrist allies could win nearly twice as many seats as President François Hollande’s Socialists.

Sarkozy’s campaign speeches have been sharply rightwing and openly negative about the Muslim community in an attempt to win votes from the far-right – for example, his argument that school canteens should not offer alternative pork-free menus to children, or that the Muslim headscarf, or hijab, should be banned from universities.

This has irritated some in his own party. But Sarkozy is likely to hail any electoral gains made by the UMP as a personal victory for himself and his veer to the right. He needs a large and decisive win for the UMP to boost his ambitions to win the party’s primary contest next year and run for president again in 2017.

Meanwhile, the ruling Socialists are expected to lose 20 to 40 of the 61 local départements that they currently head. Even traditional bastions of the left such as the Nord area around Lille as well as the Côtes d’Armor in Brittany, which has been held by the left since 1976, could fall to the right. This is significant because the Socialists traditionally have depended on a wide local base.

This could be the Socialists’ third political battering in a year, following municipal and European elections, and the party will be forced to try to heal its internal divisions. But Hollande has vowed that there will not be a reshuffle, nor will he change direction on changes such as a forthcoming review of labour laws.