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| French far right National Front 'routed' in key vote. | |
| (34 minutes later) | |
| France's far-right National Front (FN) has been beaten into third place in the second round of regional elections, exit polls indicate. | |
| Early results suggest the party failed to win a single region, despite leading in six of 13 regions in the first round of votes a week ago. | Early results suggest the party failed to win a single region, despite leading in six of 13 regions in the first round of votes a week ago. |
| The polls suggest Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-right Republican party is in the lead, ahead of the ruling Socialists. | |
| FN leader Marine Le Pen and her niece were both candidates. | FN leader Marine Le Pen and her niece were both candidates. |
| Early projections suggest both have failed to be elected, even though they had both looked to have won more than 40% of the vote in the first round. | |
| After the first round results, the Socialist Party had withdrawn its candidates from the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie where Ms Le Pen was standing, and in Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur in the south where Marion Marechal-Le Pen was standing, in order to shore up the vote against the FN. | |
| One poll suggested Ms Le Pen secured 42.5% in the second round against the centre-right's 57.5%. | |
| Xavier Bertrand, who is leading in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, said the French had given "a lesson of rallying together, courage. Here we stopped the progression of the Front National." | |
| The Socialists had withdrawn from the second round in the region to avoid splitting the vote against the FN. | |
| But Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls was less upbeat. He warned the "danger posed by the far right has not gone away, far from it." | |
| The far right's charm offensive | |
| Marine Le Pen: Taking French National Front to new highs and lows | |
| French regions have wide powers over local transport, education and economic development. | |
| The first round of voting on 6 December gave the FN the best election results in its history. | |
| It was the first electoral test since last month's Paris attacks, in which 130 people were killed - an attack claimed by the so-called Islamic State group. | |
| The FN had been hoping a strong performance would boost Marine Le Pen's chances for the 2017 presidential election. |