French PM Valls warns of National Front 'trickery'

Manuel Valls accused the National Front leader of deceiving France

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has warned voters not to fall for the "trickery" of National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen, ahead of key regional elections on Sunday.

Opinion polls suggest a surge in support for the far-right FN after the migrant crisis and the Paris attacks.

"Beware of those who say with us there would have been no attack," said Mr Valls.

Earlier the head of the bosses' group condemned the FN's policies.

Pierre Gattaz, the president of Medef, told Le Parisien the party's programme was "not economically responsible" and it reminded him of left-wing politics from the early 1980s.

Bringing the retirement age back to 60, raising the minimum wage and bringing back the franc were "exactly the opposite of what we need to kick-start economic growth in this country," he said.

Marion Marechal-Le Pen is well ahead in the opinion polls in the south-eastern region of Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur

French voters go to the polls in all 15 French regions, with a first round on 6 December and a second round the following Sunday.

According to opinion polls, support for the anti-immigration and anti-EU National Front has risen across the country to the extent that the party is on course for victory in two regions.

Marion Marechal-Le Pen, the party leader's 25-year-old niece and grand-daughter of FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, could do well in the south-eastern region of Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur.

Polls suggest she could secure 42% of the vote in the first round and go on to win the second round ahead of the centre-right mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi.

Marine Le Pen herself would also secure victory in both rounds in the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie. The party is also doing well in the polls in two other regions, Languedoc-Roussillon-Midi-Pyrenees in the south and the north-eastern region of Alsace-Lorraine-Champagne-Ardenne.

'Culpability'

Mr Valls told Europe 1 radio that an FN election victory in one or several regions would "ruin the very people it appeals to - retired people on small pensions, workers and the young".

And he said any vote for the FN after the Paris attacks would be a message of withdrawal and of hate. Marine Le Pen "doesn't love France and deceives the French", the prime minister said.

Marine Le Pen told supporters in Lille on Monday night that the level of negligence and incompetence of France's leaders had "at least some responsibility and, perhaps even given the depth of the lapses, some level of culpability" for the Paris attacks.

La Voix du Nord's banner headline on Tuesday: "Marine Le Pen and the FN are not what they say"

She asked why people who were either on the French "S-list" of suspects deemed a security threat or whose movement was supposedly under judicial control could have been able to buy detonators in a French shop and carried out the atrocities.

The FN leader has also become involved in a war of words with two French regional newspapers, which have run front pages over the past two days warning readers not to vote for her in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie.

Ms Le Pen said La Voix du Nord and its sister paper Nord Eclair were merely "tracts" for President Francois Hollande's governing Socialists.

She suggested it was "payback for the €9m (£6.3m) of subsidies they've got from the Socialists".

La Voix de Nord's headline on Monday was "Why an FN victory worries us" and it followed that up on Tuesday with: "Marine Le Pen and the FN are not what they say."