PARIS, March 15, 2010 (AFP) - France's far-right showed Monday it was still a force to be reckoned with in party politics after the National Front made a surprisingly strong showing in the first round of regional elections.
    The comeback of the National Front came as France was reeling from a year-long recession that has sent unemployment soaring and followed a public debate on national identity that exposed fears about immigration.
    The 81-year-old founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, appeared jubilant on national television after results showed the party scored a sizeable 11.55 percent of the vote, confounding analysts' predictions.
    "The National Front was declared beaten, dead, buried by the president," Le Pen said late Sunday.
    "This shows that it is still a national force, and probably destined to become greater and greater."
    The strong showing put the FN, as it is known in France, in the running for round two next Sunday, taking its anti-immigrant message to 12 of the 22 regions on France's mainland.
    Under French voting rules, party lists must garner at least 10 percent of the vote to qualify for the second round in the regional elections.
    The outcome marked a resurgence of the far-right from its dismal showing of 6.8 percent in European elections last year and the puny 4.3 percent won by Le Pen in the 2007 presidential vote.
    "This means that the far-right is not dead," said Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far-right at the French Institute of Strategic and International Relations.
    "It is not a party of government, but it is a party that can hobble the political system. It is a party of protest."
    Camus said the result also reflected the discontent of far-right voters who massively defected from the National Front during the 2007 presidential vote to back Nicolas Sarkozy.
    "They were won over by his promises of restoring the value of work and his message on law and order. Nowadays, they don't connect with him," said Camus.
    The result was better than that predicted by analysts who put far-right support at just under 10 percent nationally, but still less than the 14.7 percent registered in the last regional vote in 2004.
    Le Pen, who at 81 may be making his last run, campaigned on his signature themes of halting immigration and opposing European integration that he believes pose a threat to the French way of life.
    The party was also able to capitalise on the government's national identity debate in which citizens were asked to define what it means to be French on Internet forums and in public gatherings.
    The debate at times gave way to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rants.
    President Nicolas Sarkozy's government is also weighing measures to ban the wearing of the full Islamic veil in France, which is home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority.
    During its campaign, the FN sought to tap into fears about Islam when it released a poster that read "No to Islamism", showing a Muslim woman fully veiled and an Algerian flag plastered over a map of France with minarets portrayed as missiles.
    A French court banned the poster in a ruling just two days before voting day, saying it was offensive to Muslims, but Le Pen defiantly displayed it during his television appearance.
    The veteran politician is grooming his daughter Marine Le Pen to take over the helm of the party founded in 1972 and her strong showing in the economically depressed northern Pas-de-Calais region bolstered her standing.
    The 41-year-old Marine came in third, picking up 18.3 percent of the vote and ranking just behind the junior minister for the ecology, Valerie Letard.
    Le Pen senior shocked France and Europe when he won the second place in the 2002 presidential election and qualified for the runoff against incumbent Jacques Chirac, who won with support from left-wing voters.