French regional election run-off tests far-right strength

PARIS - Voting began on Sunday in the runoffs for French regional elections that will show whether the far-right National Front can turn popularity into power.

French President Francois Hollande voted in his electoral home base in Tulle, southwest France, amid tight security after Islamic State militant attacks that killed 130 people in Paris a month ago.

Voters took selfies with Hollande, who made no statement in line with French legislation that forbids politicians from commenting on politics as long as polling booths are open.

Boosted by fears over Europe's refugee crisis and the Paris attacks, Marine Le Pen's National Front made a breakthrough last week by taking the lead in the first round of the regional elections.

A smiling Le Pen voted in her electoral home base of Henin-Beaumont in northern France. "For me, she is going to win. Maybe it will make all those politicians stop and think," said voter Evelyne Risselin in Henin-Beaumont.

But the anti-immigration, anti-European Union National Front (FN) is by no means certain to win in any of the 13 regions in this Sunday's run-offs.

That will depend largely on what left-wing voters will do after the Socialist party withdrew from the race in the two regions where the FN was best placed - the north where Le Pen is a candidate and the southeast where her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen is running.

The Socialists urged their supporters to back Nicolas Sarkozy's conservatives in those two constituencies to keep the FN out of power, and a series of opinion polls have shown that voters might well be heeding that call.

But polls have not been run for all regions and several polls - especially in the southeast - have forecast only small differences between the candidates that were often within the margin of error for such surveys anyway.

"VERY TIGHT RACE"

"The only thing that is certain is that it will be a very tight race," political analyst Joel Gombin, a specialist on the far-right, said of the run-offs.

The Socialists, who currently govern in all but one of the 22 regions under a map that was redrawn for this election, were sure to suffer big losses of popular vote. But, paradoxically, the FN's strength, by weakening Sarkozy's conservatives, could help the Socialists cling to more regions than they hoped.

Gombin said there were many unknowns, including the turnout. Just under one in two registered voters turned up at the polling stations last week.

Much attention will also be focused on the northeast Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region, where the Socialist candidate rejected his party's call to drop out of the run-offs.

The run-offs were seen as testing the waters for all three front-runners for the 2017 presidential elections, the Socialists' Hollande, ex-president Sarkozy and Le Pen.

The FN has never managed any constituency larger than a few small and medium-sized towns, and winning a region is key to its strategy to try and convince voters it could eventually be trusted to govern the country.

In local elections in March, the National Front failed to win any department - councils that are smaller than the regions - in the run-offs despite a strong showing in the first round. That was partly because, as opposed to mainstream parties, it is isolated to the extent that it could attract no parties to strike alliances with between the two rounds.

For Sarkozy, who was hoping a landslide victory would raise his chances for re-election in 2017, the first round was a severe disappointment that weakened his hand within his Republicans party.

How many regions the conservatives eventually win in the run-offs will be pivotal to the struggle for power within the party.