Francois Hollande Calls For Unity As French Parties Divided Over Tackling National Front

Paris: French President Francois Hollande called today for unity following the record showing of the far-right National Front in regional polls, which have left traditional parties divided over how to fight back.

There needs "to be clarity in the behaviour and attitude of all political leaders to defend the values of the Republic," Hollande said through his spokesman ahead of Sunday's decisive second round of voting.

French presidents are meant to stay above the fray of party politics, and Hollande's intervention demonstrated the depth of the crisis gripping the political elite after the National Front (FN) topped polls in the first round last Sunday.

The hyper-nationalist FN, which wants to pull France out of the euro and end all immigration, took the lead in six of France's 13 regions.

Any win in the second round would hand the party control of a region for the first time, and act as a springboard for leader Marine Le Pen ahead of the 2017 presidential election.

Hollande's ruling Socialists and the opposition Republicans led by his predecessor as president, Nicolas Sarkozy, are divided over tactics for the second round.

Sarkozy has rejected calls for the two parties to gang up on the FN, and refused to paint the rise of the far-right in the same cataclysmic tones as the Socialists.

"I fight the FN morning, noon and night. The FN attacks me much more than all the others put together," Sarkozy told France Inter radio.

But he said there was nothing "immoral" about voting FN and that people's choices had to be respected.

'I'm a fighter'

That contrasts sharply with Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who has depicted the contest with the FN as a war for France's soul.

"Do you think for a single instant that the answer for France, for Europe, for the world is the far-right?" Valls told BFM TV today.

Valls said the FN wanted to return France to the "wars of religion" and undermine the country's famous law on secularity of 1905, which banished religion from public life.

Asked whether he would quit his job if the FN won some regions on Sunday, he said: "No! Because the fight is a fight for life... I'm a fighter."

In the FN's prime stomping grounds of the north and southeast -- where Marine Le Pen and her 25-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen respectively took over 40 percent of the vote in the first round -- the Socialists have accepted they have no chance of winning.

They have yanked their candidates from those two regions -- the economically-depressed Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie in the northeast and the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur -- in the hope that voters will back Sarkozy's candidates and keep the FN from power.

The Socialists also considered pulling out of a third contest, the eastern Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine on Germany's border, but its local candidate has refused to throw in the towel.

The FN has watched with some relish as the traditional parties scramble for a response to their rise.

"They change their opinions to suit their interests," Marine Le Pen told Europe 1 radio today.

"They are capable of saying everything, and the opposite of everything."

By contrast, the FN has stuck to its straightforward agenda, which worries many in the country but which has growing hold in the face of a struggling economy and concerns over immigration and terrorism.

Part of the party's success has been down to tapping into deep-rooted Islamophobia, while playing up historical and cultural themes.

"We are not a land of Islam," Marion Marechal-Le Pen said last week.

"In our country, we don't wear djellaba clothing, we don't wear a veil and we don't impose cathedral-sized mosques.

"I want to rediscover our France, that of Louis XIV, of Napoleon..."