An openly racist party with deep roots in France’s fascist tradition, the Front National (FN), won control of a dozen local authorities, in March 2014. Two months later it gained more seats than any other party in the European elections with a quarter of the vote. Some opinion polls in 2014 even identified its leader, Marine Le Pen, as the figure most likely to win the first round of the 2017 presidential election. Le Pen has vowed to put mosques under surveillance, tap the phones of ‘proselytisers’ and ban ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols from all public services. She has compared the sight of Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi occupation of France and promised to bring the ‘gangrene’ or ‘green fascism’ of radical Islam ‘to its knees’.
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