Voter turnout on the rise in high-stakes French regional election
By Ingrid Melander PARIS (Reuters) - Voter turnout rose substantially in France on Sunday for the second round of regional elections in a high-stakes ballot that will show whether the far-right National Front can turn its growing popularity into power. Marine Le Pen's party achieved a breakthrough last week by taking the lead in the first round of the vote, drawing strength from fears over Europe's refugee crisis and the Islamic State militant attacks that killed 130 people in Paris a month ago. But the anti-immigrant, anti-European Union National Front (FN) was by no means certain to take any of the 13 regions. The outcome will depend largely on what left-wing voters will do after the ruling Socialist party withdrew from the race in the two regions where the FN was performing best - the north where Le Pen is a candidate, and the southeast where her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen is running. The Socialists feared that some of their supporters might stay home rather than go and vote for the party of conservative ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is widely despised by the left. Just under one in two registered voters turned up at the polling stations last week. But turnout already stood at 50.54 percent by 1600 GMT and was forecast by Harris Interactive pollsters to reach 58.5 percent on Sunday, against 51.2 percent in the second round five years ago. "Voters should not be treated like children, nor be terrorised," a smiling Marine Le Pen told reporters after casting her vote in Henin-Beaumont, commenting on the Socialists' call to vote for the conservatives in those two regions. "VERY TIGHT RACE" First estimates of the outcome were due at 1900 GMT, when polling stations close. Much attention will also be focused on the northeast Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region, where the Socialist candidate rejected his party's call to drop out of the run-offs. The run-offs were seen as testing of the waters for all three front-runners for the 2017 presidential elections, the Socialists' Hollande, ex-president Sarkozy and Le Pen. The FN has never managed any constituency larger than a few small and medium-sized towns, and winning a region is central to its strategy to try and convince voters it could eventually be trusted to govern the country. In local elections in March, the National Front failed to win any department in the run-offs despite a strong showing in the first round. That was partly because it was unable to attract other parties to strike alliances with between the two rounds. For Sarkozy, who was hoping a landslide victory would raise his chances for re-election in 2017, the first round was a severe disappointment that weakened his hand within his party, The Republicans. How many regions the conservatives eventually win will be pivotal to the struggle for power within the party. The Socialists, who currently govern in all but one of the 22 regions under a map that was redrawn for this election, were sure to suffer big losses of popular vote. But, paradoxically, the FN's strength, by weakening Sarkozy's conservatives, could help the Socialists cling to more regions than they hoped. (Additional reporting by Morade Azzouz and Geert De Clercq; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Ros Russell)
