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'Far-right' Vienna ball condemned on Holocaust Day Protesters voiced their outrage over the timing of the ball Continue reading the main story Related Stories Hitler's hometown revokes honour Vienna to honour WWII deserters Austria still haunted by Nazi past Protesters in Austria marking Holocaust Remembrance Day have condemned organisers of a ball which was expected to be attended by far-right leaders. Greens' Party head Eva Glavischnig said guests at Vienna's WKR event would be "dancing on the graves of Auschwitz" - a reference to the Nazi death camp. But the organisers rejected the accusations, saying the ball was always held...

The euro-zone crisis and the streak of European and global summits over the past month boosted the poll ratings of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who appeared to gain some of the ground he had lost to Socialist challenger Francois Hollande five months ahead of the presidential election next May, when he's expected to seek a second mandate, a poll showed. If the first round of presidential elections had been held Sunday, Sarkozy would have garnered 29% of the votes, trailing Hollande by only 1 percentage point, a LH2-Yahoo! poll published late Sunday showed. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen came third...

Amneville, a town in the Moselle region of northeastern France, does not look like a fault-line in the euro zone. The smell of grilled chicken wafts over the marketplace on a recent Saturday morning, the CD vendor plays German oom-pah music, and the sky behind the ochre clock tower is a steely blue. Yet the single currency is a target for an unusual politician canvassing stallholders and shoppers in this town near the German border. Fabien Engelmann, a 32-year old municipal plumber with tight-cropped hair, was an activist with France's leading trade union and a Trotskyist for many years. Later...

PARIS (Reuters) - Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front gave French President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservatives a fright on Sunday, snapping at the heels of the mainstream center-right in poorly attended local elections. With 86 percent of votes counted, Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the president's center-right supporters had won 32.5 percent of the vote, with left-wing parties totaling 48 percent and Le Pen's anti-immigrant party polling 15 percent.

After several polls showed Marine Le Pen more than holding her own against rivals in a hypothetical presidential match-up, FRANCE 24 sat down with the far-right leader for a wide-ranging interview touching on Europe, immigration and nuclear energy. Riding high on strong showings in a handful of French polls on the 2012 presidential election, National Front leader Marine Le Pen has had an early start on the campaign trail. The far right politician, who took over from her father as head of the party in January, sat down with FRANCE 24 journalist Roselyne Fèbvre for an interview covering a wide...

ROME (AP) — Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right National Front party, warned Italy Tuesday to prepare to "accept half of the world population" if it starts taking in economic refugees. Le Pen on Monday toured an immigrant center in Lampedusa, a small Italian island where thousands of would-be migrants fleeing unrest in North Africa and the Mideast have landed. She said she learnt from her visit that the majority of migrants were men aged between 20 and 30, who "are obviously economic refugees."

After 38 years at the head of the head of France’s Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen is hoping to pass on the party leadership to his daughter Marine. With an initiative that is in part a dynastic succession and partly a modernisation strategy similar to those deployed by far-right parties elsewhere in Europe, the FN is gearing up for presidential elections in 2012. Her father's daughter: Marine Le Pen in 2006 Times have changed at the Front National. The era when Jean-Marie Le Pen would bang on about gas chambers being "just one detail of the Second World War," highly...

MARINE LE PEN tried her best to flee her father and politics, she says, oppressed by the infamy of her inheritance, which followed her everywhere. But now she is widely expected to succeed Jean-Marie Le Pen as leader of the National Front, the persistent far-right party preaching French purity and exceptionalism, opposing immigration and the European Union, and which she wants to bring into the media age. More and more, she is the face of the party in television debates and national campaigning. “It’s amazing to see how destiny can mock you sometimes,” she said in a long interview at...

A leftist candidate backed by an array of political parties successfully staved off his far-right opponent in a mayoral race Sunday that the National Front had hope would start its comeback. Other parties, from communists to President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservatives, rallied behind Daniel Duquenne whom voters designated the new mayor of Henin-Beaumont, a former mining town in northern France, in a runoff race. The victor was sprayed with tear gas minutes after the results were announced, a police officer said by telephone, confirming reports on France-Info radio and the French TV station iTele. Duquenne was not injured and the aggressor...

Marine Le Pen, daughter of the leader of France's National Front, is raring to go. Described as "an ideal physical specimen" by Jean-Marie Le Pen and wryly as "the clone" by her mother, the 35-year-old lawyer has one overriding objective: to become the acceptable, electable face of the extreme right. Her political skills will be put to the test next March when she runs for the presidency of the greater Paris regional council, in the first elections since last year's presidential vote produced the biggest upset in French postwar political history. Campaigning in a region that boasts 11m inhabitants will...