France braces itself for the backlash if Marine Le Pen triumphs

With less than twenty four hours before polling booths open in France, the country’s security forces are on full alert for another attack by Islamist extremists. More than 50,000 police and 7,000 soldiers have been mobilised as part of the massive security operation but they still lack the resources to safeguard every polling station. In Paris, for example, only 400 of the 896 polling booths will have security personnel on duty.

But it’s not just Islamists who are menacing France. The far left has called for a ‘Night of Barricades’ [a reference to the May demonstrations of 1968] to begin on Sunday at 6pm, to oppose what they describe as this ‘masquerade of an election…between liberalism on the one side and fascism on the other’.

By fascism, they mean the National Front, although so far in this election campaign it has been the far-left who has played the part of the fascists.