Le Pen takes her victory party back to the 'rustbelt'

It was in a down-at-heel town in the Front National heartlands of northern France, far from the despised Parisian elite, that Marine Le Pen chose to celebrate the election victory that brought her just one step from becoming the country's next president.

"What is at stake here is the survival of France," she told a wildly cheering crowd after the results were announced from the first round of voting in the most unpredictable and important election for decades.

She was speaking in a sports hall on the edge of the town of Hénin-Beaumont, a couple of hours' drive north of Paris in the French "rustbelt", where the coal mines closed long ago and the factories moved to eastern Europe or Asia.

Behind the hall, ironically named the "François Mitterrand Centre" after the late Socialist president, lies a giant slag heap, a reminder of the now disappeared mines whose traditionally left-wing workers were won over by Le Pen's anti-globalisation crusade.

Seventy-three-year-old Jules Leveque, who once worked in the metal industry, said Le Pen was the only one who could pull France out of the economic doldrums, stem mass unemployment, and boost welfare payments.

"I can just about survive on my pension and the Government is handing money out to immigrants all the time," he said as he waited in the hall for the initial results.

Le Pen, a 48-year-old lawyer, has spent years trying to make the far-right Front National party more mainstream, to move it away from the xenophobia and anti-semitism that had infected it since its creation in the 1970s by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is still central to her rhetoric, but she has managed to make the party palatable to a growing number of voters who bought into her anti-elite discourse and her promises to ditch the euro and possibly take France out of the European Union.

She even banned the words "Front National" and her family name from all election campaign literature and from the stage sets for her rallies, using only the slogans "Marine Présidente" and "Au Nom du Peuple".

As she rested after casting her vote, she knew she was about to find out if that lengthy process of "dédiabolisation" (roughly translated as de-demonisation) had paid off.

Paris was a disaster zone for Marine Le Pen (as usual): She got 5.0% there. She got between 3% & 6% in the city's 20 arrondissements.

— Taniel (@Taniel) April 24, 2017

The crowd fell silent and all eyes turned to the giant screens tuned to a news channel that would exactly on the hour reveal the exit poll results.

Emmanuel Macron, a maverick centrist who resigned as finance minister in President François Hollande's Socialist government to make a bid for the presidency, was declared the winner on around 23 per cent.

But Le Pen was just two points behind, and that was enough to place her as one of the two candidates who will battle it out in two weeks for the keys of the Elysée palace.

The sports hall erupted with rapturous applause and wild cheering and many broke into renditions of La Marseillaise, the national anthem, or chanted "On a gagné!" (We've won!).

About an hour later the triumphant candidate appeared on the hall's stage, dressed as ever in a dark trouser suit, a huge grin spread across her face.

But her message was mostly gloomy, listing the dangers that faced the country and that were of course caused by the alternating governments of both left and right, and warning that only a vote for her on May 7 could save the country.

Trump has no favorite in the French election, Priebus insists, despite the president's tweet https://t.co/CDkP2WrbqU

— Anne Rumsey Gearan (@agearan) April 24, 2017

"It is time to free all the French... from the arrogant elites," she thundered, adding that she was "the candidate of the people".

She added: "This result is historic, the first step has been taken".

Even as she spoke her political foes on both left and right, as well as the defeated presidential candidates, were planning alliances to keep her out of power, and on Bastille square in Paris "anti-fascist" youths skirmished with riot police to protest at her election victory.

Le Pen's father made it through to the second round of the 2002 presidential election but was then crushed by the conservative Jacques Chirac after both left- and right-wing voters rallied together to defeat him.

Many believed that Jean-Marie Le Pen never really wanted to rule but was more interested in being a thorn in the side of the establishment.

There are few who think Marine is happy to be no more than a political nuisance. She has made it clear she wants power.