Add Category
Updated
In France, the National Front has gone from fringe party status, condemned as bigoted and racist, to having the presidential palace in its sights.
The woman who has led them there is Marine Le Pen.
The 48-year-old has consistently been one of the top two candidates in opinion polls as French voters head into the first round of voting this Sunday.
The campaign has been unlike any before.
Pollsters have tipped that Ms Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron - an independent centrist who only formed his own party, En Marche, a year ago - will go head to head in the run-off on May 8.
"Marine Le Pen has a real dynamic," pollster Jerome Fourquet said.
"During the last election in 2012 she did 18 per cent and today in the polls she has 25 to 26 per cent, so there's a progression of seven to eight points.
"She will obviously go on to the second round."
A party for patriots
Since her father Jean-Marie Le Pen was expelled from the National Front in 2015, the party has undergone a transformation as Ms Le Pen has tried to "detoxify" it.
Political observers say the party has broadened its base and appealed to communities that previously would have shunned it.
Amar Chaib Draa is a National Front supporter in Chartres, an hour-and-a-half south of Paris.
"Marine Le Pen welcomes all the patriots," he said.
"She doesn't care if they are Muslim, if they are Christians, if they are Jew, if they are gay, if they are straight.
"You know you are all welcome as long as you like your country and that's it."
He was handing out National Front leaflets on a Saturday, knocking on doors and finding a generally favourable reception in the city of 40,000 people.
Finding support in gay community
Eric Laqua, who is openly gay, said it shouldn't surprise anyone that the National Front welcomed homosexuals, despite the party once saying AIDS victims should be rounded up. The party still plans to abolish gay marriage.
"People believe the old images, the old clichés that are being promoted by the other parties," he said.
"For me today Marine Le Pen is our Joan of Arc.
"She's the one who is going to save France, bring France back up, give hope to French people."
Jean-Francois Belmondo is another gay man, a professional in the medical industry who lives in Paris.
"Nowadays things have changed and I feel the homosexual community like any other community no longer votes according to its sexual orientations but rather according to the patriotism they have in their heart and their desire to see things change," he said.
National Front supporters are hoping to replicate the electoral success they've seen in places like Frejus, a retiree-haven on the Riveria in the south of France.
"All is right, have a look here in France, all the accounts are right, all is clean, we have security, all we need, and you don't have anything like that in the rest of France," stallholder Francoise Wehrli said.
"I will be very glad if she was president.
"We need it, somebody like her, we need France to stay France."
But there are also detractors, like Jean-Paul Radigois who is the president of the Frejus Committee.
He thinks a Le Pen victory would be a catastrophe for France.
"Frejus has become a test village, a laboratory if you will for the National Front," he said.
"It's true that many French people are tired of politics in general, both the left and the right.
"But the extreme right is promising so much - a better life, an exit from the EU, an end to the euro that many will vote for them for that reason."
The mayor of Frejus, David Rachline, is Ms Le Pen's campaign manager and he's convinced she can become president.
"It's a dynamic that's come from far," he said.
"Every time that the system is telling us there is a glass ceiling we cannot reach, precisely at this point Marine Le Pen and the Front National progress."
Watch the story on Lateline's special program on the French election, tonight at 9.30pm on ABC News or 10.30pm on ABC TV.
Topics: world-politics, community-and-society, france
First posted