For the National Front, the local elections on March 23, with run-off elections a week later, are expected to confirm the growing support for the nationalist party. Then in May, a strong showing in the European Parliament elections could result in the National Front emerging as France’s biggest party.

Opinion: Free the Scots!

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Tony Award-winning actor Alan Cumming on why Scotland should vote for independence from the United Kingdom. Photo credit: Getty Images.

Heady stuff for a party that advocates a referendum for France to leave the euro
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and the European Union, and which seeks to raise new barriers at the country’s relatively open borders.

It has long been a question how deep the current runs in France for this tenacious party and what it would take for that subterranean support to bubble to the surface. According to the polls, a lot more support will be bubbling up in these elections.

However, the abstention rate is expected to approach 40% — very high for France — and the best the National Front can probably hope for is to double its result in the last local elections in 2008 to about 15% of the vote.

The biggest city where it hopes to install a mayor is Perpignan, a conservative redoubt on the border with Spain. Part of the calculation is that the party’s candidate for mayor there is Le Pen’s partner, Louis Aliot.

The two mainstream blocs of center-left and center-right parties, often benefiting from incumbents, will capture most city halls, but the National Front hopes to win 10 to 15 of the bigger cities.

In France as elsewhere, local issues often decide local elections. But the deep dissatisfaction with Socialist President François Hollande, after voters gave him the nod because of deep dissatisfaction with his center-right predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, means that national politics could play a significant role in this vote.

Marine Le Pen inherited the right-wing mantle from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front in 1972 and was its longtime leader.

He was as surprised as anyone when he emerged as one of the two leaders in the first round of the 2002 presidential vote, beating out the Socialist Party candidate, Lionel Jospin, to take part in the runoff election, which he lost in an historic landslide to Jacques Chirac.

For the French magazine, however, this “de-demonization” is just a façade, a superficial facelift that doesn’t change the fundamental conservatism and xenophobia of the party.

It seems to be working, however. Marine Le Pen ran third in the 2012 presidential race — with 18% of the vote in the first round to her father’s 16% in 2002 — and she has great expectations for the 2017 presidential race, presuming all goes according to plan in this year’s elections.

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