Le Pen more popular with French voters than Sarko

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right National Front party, would win the first-round of a presidential election if it were held today, a poll of French voters shows.

The survey, carried out by the Harris Institute, appears in today's Le Parisien newspaper and will make uncomfortable reading not just for incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy but for anyone who fears the rise of the extreme right-wing in European politics.

Le Pen took over the leadership of the National Front from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in January this year. A lawyer and twice-divorced mother-of-three, the bottle-blonde 42-year-old is as firmly right-wing as her predecessor.

Le Pen has continued the recent process of publicly mitigating the National Front's anti-Semitism and holocaust-denial in favour of focusing attention on Islam and immigration.

In December she provoked outrage by suggesting that weekly closure of streets in French towns to allow Muslim prayers was "an occupation" in a speech which mentioned World War II.

The tactic is evidently working: the Harris poll suggested that Le Pen would get 23 per cent of the vote in a presidential election held today, with Sarkozy and Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry trailing with 21 per cent apiece.

However, France will not go to the polls to elect its next president until May 2012 so Le Pen has no reason for complacency. Even if she did win a first-round vote she would still face a run-off, on the Harris poll figures.

In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen achieved a shock second place ahead of socialist candidate Lionel Jospin in the first round, before going on to lose to Jacques Chirac.

Nonetheless, Sarkozy's popularity has plummeted over recent months. Le Pen has seized on this, saying: "There's a trend that makes me think that Nicolas Sarkozy is going to lose the presidential elections.

"I don't think he can climb back up. He represents such a disappointment and rejection by French people that I think he's already out of the second round."

The French are not the only voters evidently tempted by the extreme right: a survey by Populus in the UK last week found that a huge number of Britons would vote for a far-right English nationalist party if it renounced violence and fascist imagery.

Forty-eight per cent of the population said they would support an anti-Islamic extremism party making St George's cross flags mandatory on all public buildings. ·