France Front National Marine Le PenREUTERS/Pascal RossignolFrench National Front political party leader and candidate Marine Le Pen after the announcement of the results during the first round of the regional elections in Henin-Beaumont, France, on Sunday.
France's hard-right National Front has just made history, storming to first place in the country's regional elections.
The exit polls on Sunday evening showed National Front, or FN, in first place on 30.6% of the vote. The two mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties racked up 27% and 22.7% respectively.
For the first time, the country seems likely to have at least one region controlled by the hard-right, anti-immigration populist party.
FN is just one of a group of similar (and previously fringe) political movements making massive headway across Europe.
The two best areas for FN seem to be Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, where party leader Marine Le Pen is running for the regional council, and the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote-d'Azur, where her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen is leading the FN effort.
Overall, the party seems to have come in first place in six regions out of 12.
France24 offers a look at FN's policies: In short, the party is more strongly against immigration than any European party currently in government, and it wants to boost security and justice spending. Economically, the bloc is quite protectionist and against the euro, and members favour a socially conservative line on family issues, opposing same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples.
Marion Marechal-Le Pen, French National FrontREUTERS/Jean-Paul PelissierMarion Marechal-Le Pen, French National Front candidate in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur region, during her speech after the announcement of the results during the first round of the regional elections in Le Pontet, near Avignon, France, on Sunday.
France's electoral system is stacked heavily against more extremist parties. In this case there will be a second round of regional elections, and the Socialist Party (of Francois Hollande, France's president) will withdraw from the ballot in the north and southeast, leaving it as a competition between FN and the centre-right Republicans.
It's not the first time FN has done well — in France's 2002 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen (Marine Le Pen's father) edged out the Socialist Party candidate to come in second place. But in the second round between Le Pen and Jacques Chirac, Le Pen was crushed, getting 17.8% to Chirac's 82.2%.
National Front was expected to perform well in the elections, and it has picked up much more support in the past few years, but it may have gained even more in the aftermath of the brutal attacks on Paris in November.
Here's what Barclays analyst Francois Cabau had to say about the vote before it happened:
[The elections] are the last occasion to gauge the mind of the population before the 2017 Presidential and General elections. Furthermore, two key topics have dominated the news recently — the migrant crisis and the fight against terrorism — and voting is likely to reflect opinions on national issues rather than regional ones.
The party's anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, and eurosceptic policies have racked up support in recent years, and Marine Le Pen is not associated as closely with fascist politics as her father was. In fact, Jean-Marie Le Pen was expelled from FN earlier this year for "playing down the Holocaust" according to The Wall Street Journal.

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