HENIN-BEAUMONT (France): Marine Le Pen sees political gold in the abandoned coal mines of northern France that once pumped life, jobs and an identity into places like Henin-Beaumont — a bleak town that the far-right leader says is the avant-garde of her anti-immigration party’s march to power.

Le Pen has been digging the terrain of discontent around France, and in Henin-Beaumont — a Socialist bastion for decades — she is counting on a win in municipal elections that begin on Sunday, the first of a string of electoral tests she hopes will catapult her National Front to the forefront of French political life.

Le Pen’s party, which disdains the European Union and globalisation and fears that Islamic culture will subvert French civilisation, is aiming to leverage the municipal vote to build a grassroots base upon which to draw ahead of May elections for the European Parliament and the French presidential vote in 2017.

Le Pen told The Associated Press in an interview that, while local concerns are at the centre of the municipal vote, the National Front will ensure that party priorities like secularism are respected where it wins.

That could be a potential flashpoint for conflict in towns with large Muslim populations where some groups seek to build mosques or serve halal food in school cafeterias.

“We don’t have problems with Islam,” she said, while adding: “France has Christian roots. [The French] want to recognise their own country, recognise their lifestyle, their habits, their traditions.”

And the fringes of her movement cause concern. The March 23 and 30 elections for mayors and town councillors could shake up the profile of many of France’s 36,000 villages, towns and cities, most significantly in Paris. The nation’s crown jewel will be getting its first female mayor as two women vie for the job, Socialist Anne Hidalgo and rival conservative Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet.

The National Front hopes to benefit from widespread disappointment in the forces that have dominated French politics for decades. Scandals are engulfing former president Nicolas Sarkozy and his fractious conservative party.

Meanwhile the Socialists, who wrested major cities from Sarkozy’s UMP in the last local elections in 2008, are suffering from President Francois Hollande’s deep unpopularity and a government that has failed to create jobs or improve the economy.

“The system fears our vote, our choice for change,” Le Pen said at a rally in a packed hall in Henin-Beaumont last week. She was there to support her party’s mayoral candidate, Steeve Briois, but made clear the local vote carries a national message.

“The municipal elections have an essential role, to give hope to the French,” she said. “You are the avant-garde, the first to witness with rage in your hearts” all that is wrong with France.

With a dearth of trained officials, the National Front cannot compete on equal footing with leading parties. But it is still running candidates in 596 towns — a party record. Even winning a handful of local municipalities would represent a sharp disavowal of mainstream politics.

The National Front “is the only revolutionary party in France today,” said Patrick Martinez, 50, holding a Bloc Identitaire banner at a recent anti-Islam protest march in Paris.

He said he would vote National Front in his Lyon hometown because “we have nothing better today”.

Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault urged voters this week to “do everything” to keep National Front candidates from reaching city halls.

Muslims in the town refused to comment to visiting reporters, in an apparent sign of growing concern.

The red brick town of Henin-Beaumont, about 200 kilometres north of Paris with a population of 26,000, is a perfect showcase for the National Front. Dark, eerily majestic hills of coal refuse, known as terrils, dot the horizon, a reminder of an economically vibrant past when coal was king. French labourers and immigrants from Europe and Muslim North Africa flocked to the area in the 19th century for back-breaking coal mining, famously depicted in Emile Zola’s “Germinal”.

Marine Le Pen, a 45-year-old mother of three, took over the National Front in 2010, working to clean its racist and anti-Semitic image and shoo away jack-booted followers in an attempt to make it a legitimate political alternative, not just a catch-all for protest votes.

She’s been so successful that her party’s tirades against Muslim immigration are mimicked on the right and, more subtly, on the left. Marine Le Pen placed a strong third in the 2012 presidential race, and the National Front won two parliamentary seats.

High unemployment and crime rates, corruption, and a visible Muslim population, are like calling cards for the National Front.

Le Pen told The AP that she thought Islamic Sharia law would take over French justice within three decades if “mass immigration” was not stopped.

“The martyred city of Henin-Beaumont, you will be the renaissance of France,” she told the crowd at her final rally there. “You will show that another kind of politics is possible.”—AP