The mayor of a Belgian industrial town cut off ties with a sister city in southern France on Monday after the far right won its city hall in weekend local elections. The far-right National Front will take control of about a dozen French towns after elections Sunday, including Beaucaire, a sun-soaked bullfighting town where 30-year-old Julien Sanchez, a party official, is to become the next mayor.

Fights started outside French town halls tonight as they came under the control of the far-right National Front for the first time following dramatic gains in local elections. Exit polls suggested that the anti-immigration and anti-Europe party had roundly beaten the governing Socialists in a number of key constituencies. 'Demonstrators are trying to get at the Front representatives and starting fights,' said a police spokesman in Frejus, the picturesque Mediterranean town which is hugely popular with British tourists.

In the French capital, Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo won 54.5 percent of votes against Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet of the conservative opposition UMP party. Hidalgo, who has served for 13 years as deputy to outgoing Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, will become the first female mayor of the capital. Victories in Paris and Lyon came as consolation for the ruling Socialists, who suffered heavy defeats against the UMP in cities across the country, including Toulouse, Angers and Limoges.

In the French capital, Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo won 54.5 percent of votes against Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet of the conservative opposition UMP party. Hidalgo, who has served for 13 years as deputy to outgoing Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, will become the first female mayor of the capital. Victories in Paris and Lyon came as consolation for the ruling Socialists, who suffered heavy defeats against the UMP in cities across the country, including Toulouse, Angers and Limoges.

France's anti-immigrant National Front (FN) scored gains in first-round town hall elections on Sunday and took control of a former Socialist bastion as voters punished President Francois Hollande and his left-wing allies. The elections in thousands of constituencies across France were the first nationwide voter test for Hollande, who came to power in May 2012 and has seen his popularity slump to record lows for failing to rein in unemployment.

"The new age of the extreme right”, was the headline in France’s Nouvel Observateur magazine the day after France’s National Front party scored five percent of the vote in the first round of the

Marine Le Pen appears to be on a roll. A local by-election win in mid-October left her socialist and conservative competitors in the dust, and she's attained record-breaking popularity: 42 percent of recently polled voters have a positive opinion of her, compared to 35 percent for Socialist President Francois Hollande. And polling in France for the next European Parliament vote put Le Pen's National Front party in first place. But how could it be that a far-right party is threatening to outflank traditional major parties in a key European Union country?

As she surges to new heights in opinion polls, the National Front leader Marine Le Pen has threatened to sue journalists who describe her party as far right. “They put us in the same bag as [mass murderer Anders] Breivik and [the Greek neo-Nazi party] Golden Dawn. They shake up the bag and try to give us a filthy image,” Ms Le Pen said. From now on, she warned, she would sue any journalist who waged “linguistic war” on her party. It is not just her cleaned-up version of the National Front which should never be described as far right, she said.

France's ruling Socialist Party expressed dismay Monday after two far right candidates came within a whisker of claiming 50 percent of the vote in a local by-election. In a result that reflected the extreme right's rising popularity, the representative of the Front National (FN) got 40.4 percent of votes in the first round of Sunday's by-election in the southeastern town of Brignoles while an independent extreme right candidate won 9.1 percent. The result came in an area where the far right has traditionally done well but it was nevertheless seen as symbolically significant.