A spectacular result for Marine Le Pen and France's far right

Well, it's a well known scarecrow tactics from the rest of the parties. They'll all wear horrified looks for a week, tell the voters that Democracy's Future is a stake and so on and so forth, and the sheep^H^H^H^Hvoters will vote for anyone else next week. That was the case in pretty all the other elections were the far right lead at the first round.

It works really well as a tactic too; if there is a risk of the far right (or the UKIP, or whatever is the pet 'extremist' party in your country) making serious advance, you first /encourage/ the electorate to go for a 'rejection vote' -- and when it works, everyone will look at each others saying 'OMG, what have we done!' and vote the usual complete incompetent at the second round. Pfew, we're all safe again.

The last excellent example of this tactic's implementation was the UKIP rise and fall in the UK; that was textbook.

I'm writing this as a French national living in the UK, but also as a completely apolitical observer BTW.

Here is the map: http://www.france24.com/en/20151206-france-far-right-nationa...

Although this is only the first round and each region's score is independent, in a national average the far right party get 28%, the traditional right gets 27%, and the currently elected leftish party of Francois Hollande gets 23%.

The last paragraph of the OP is the most interesting: It is as much a reaction to the current economic dismay and the current politics of the reigning government as a reaction to the immigration wave and to the management of the terrorist attacks.

As for my opinion: Don't run an election during a state of emergency where demonstrators are arrested. Also, it is important that moderate people have no-one to vote for, because the leftish party focusses on war instead of economy.

For example entrepreneur's tax office RSI was measured [1] to request wrong tax amount to 40% of its 3 million members among other failures, and was denied a reform in Spetember by the Socialist party. President Francois Hollande from the same Socialist party has now decided to add even more debt than allowed by the cap of European treaties in order to lead the war in Syria. Many things require social measures in France, but the reigning party is focussed on terrorism.

[1] RSI was inspected by Cour des Comptes: http://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2015/09/21/pourq...