Suspense as French far right eyes first regional prize

France voted on Dec. 13 with the far-right National Front (FN) hoping to win control of a region for the first time, giving leader Marine Le Pen a launchpad for her presidential bid in 2017.

Voting opened amid heightened security, especially in Paris, as France remains under a state of emergency declared after the Nov. 13 attacks that claimed 130 lives.
 
The anti-immigration FN topped the vote in six of 13 regions in the first round of voting last Sunday, capitalising on security fears in the wake of the Paris attacks.
 
But the FN faces an uphill battle to consolidate those gains after the ruling Socialist Party withdrew its candidates from two key regions and urged their supporters there to back former president Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative Republicans.
 
"The political world has been thrown off course completely," said a 34-year-old voter who gave his name only as Sylvain. "Asking us to vote to prevent the FN from winning, without the elites asking themselves any questions at all, shows that there is something seriously wrong."  

The race is expected to be close in several regions.  Pollster Jean-Daniel Levy of Harris Interactive said the FN was "almost certain" to win one region, while Bruno Jeanbart of OpinionWay said it would win between "zero and five".
   
A TNS-Sofres poll on Wednesday showed Le Pen, who heads the party list in the economically depressed northeastern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region, would lose easily to the Republicans' Xavier Bertrand.    

In the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur region, her 26-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen was shown far behind the Republicans' Christian Estrosi.
 
Other polls gave similar results in the regional elections, the...