French elections: Left will lend votes to centre-right to block Marine Le Pen

The elections represent a seismic shift, with Le Pen certain to reach the presidential run-off

Marine Le Pen's Front National topped opinion polls in six out of 12 regions in mainland France at the weekend (Rex)

Left-wing voters will switch in droves to the centre-right to prevent Marine Le Pen from winning any French region in the second round of elections this Sunday, opinion polls now suggest, foreshadowing an explosive three-way struggle for the French presidency in 18 months’ time.

Such an outcome would be a significant blow to Ms Le Pen but would leave her far right Front National with unprecedented levels of support. Although the FN topped the poll in six out of 12 regions in mainland France last Sunday – and Ms Le Pen scored over 40 per cent of the vote in the Calais-Lille-Amiens region –a series of opinion polls published yesterday suggest that the xenophobic, anti-European party will fail to win any region this Sunday.

The gamble of the ruling Socialist party in withdrawing its candidates in the industrial north and in the Marseille-Nice region in the south appears to have paid off.

Although pollsters warned that the political mood was febrile and could change in the next two days, the surveys showed that over 70 per cent of left-wing voters in these areas would back centre-right candidates and “barricade” the FN from governing a region for the first time.

Ms Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, 26, who had seemed certain to be the next president of the Marseilles-Nice region, is forecast to take 46 per cent of the vote – an unprecedented level of support for the FN in a bastion of former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right. The polls suggest that she will, nonetheless, lose narrowly to the mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, who scored only 26.6 per cent in the first round.

Ms Le Pen is forecast to win 47 per cent of the vote in the industrial north-west – once a stronghold of the left – but she is predicted to lose to the centre-right former health and education minister, Xavier Bertrand. In the third big battleground region, Alsace-Lorraine-Champagne-Ardennes, where the local Socialist leader refused to withdraw, local polls suggest the centre-right will win narrowly thanks to tactical voting.

The NF is also expected to fail to build on its high first-round vote in three other regions. Although many in France – and abroad – will breathe a sigh of relief if the polls prove correct, the regional elections will nonetheless represent a seismic shift in French politics. Ms Le Pen, who claims to represent a cleaned-up and democratic version of the far right, looks certain to reach the two-candidate run-off in the presidential election in 2017.

Paradoxically, the results, although disastrous for the Socialist government, could offer an electoral lifeline to the unpopular President François Hollande. Barons of the French centre-right are confronting the prospect that they may about to be overtaken by the FN as the main “alternative” to the centre-left.

The results have been catastrophic for Mr Sarkozy, who returned to lead the centre-right last year with the boast that only he could block the rise of Ms Le Pen. His party, Les Républicains, is now faced with the possibility that Mr Sarkozy might fail to reach the two-candidate run-off.