Doubs: Polar opposites at polls

France's National Front (FN) hopes to nick a seat from the Socialists and send Sophie Montel to Paris as the party's third member of the lower house. In the February 1 first round in the eastern Doubs district - called after Socialist lawmaker Pierre Moscovici left for Brussels to take office as European economic affairs commissioner - the 45-year-old had come in first with close one-third of the vote.

Her opponent on Sunday, the 54-year-old Socialist Frederic Barbier, 54, won just under 29 percent last week, and Charles Demogue, of the main opposition Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), fell out of the race after taking about 26.5 percent.

FN chief Marine Le Pen called on voters to mobilize, saying Friday that the result remained "very open."

UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president and potentially a contender again, has warned that the risk remains that the FN could take even more power at the national level. Nevertheless, he called on UMP supporters to abstain from polls Sunday, leading to the possibility that the decisive round could see even fewer voters than the under 40 percent who turned out on February 1.

Polls suggest that the Socialists will win, but the by-election has proved a test for President Francois Hollande. Since he took power in 2012 after beating Sarkozy, France has seen 13 by-elections, of which the Socialists have won zero.

Fresh arrests

Sunday's runoff also comes as competing ideologies have taken sway France following attacks that began January 7 at Charlie Hebdo and ended January 9 with further killings at a Paris kosher supermarket, leaving 20 dead, including the gunmen. Until the attacks last month, opinion polls had showed Hollande as the most unpopular president in modern French history. An opinion poll carried out by the Ifop polling company 10 days after the attacks, however, showed that Hollande's call for unity helped his approval rating double - to 40 percent.

FN members say the killings, by men who practiced an extreme form of Islam, proves their case that too much migration is a threat to France. Muslim migrants have increasingly sought protection in the face of the right-wing rhetoric and threats of physical violence.

As voters went to the pulls in Doubs on Sunday, police in Toulouse and Albi launched a series of sweeps, the latest of several targeting suspected extremists. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said police detained six people for suspected extremist activities. He didn't say whether those arrested might have any link to the gunmen behind the January 7-9 attacks.

mkg/rc (AFP, dpa, AP)