Le Pen predicted a major FN foray in this month's local polls, which pollsters and analysts have also forecast, would lead to more electoral victories and eventually shatter the bipolar order of French politics.
"This (municipal) election is the first in a series which must drive us -- I sense that profoundly -- to Marine Le Pen's election victory in 2017," the 85-year-old said, addressing a crowd of supporters in the southwestern city of Toulouse.
He spent much of the rest of his speech vilifying the European Union and blaming France's economic woes on immigrants.
Still the party's honorary leader, Le Pen has repeatedly been convicted of racial hatred and Holocaust denial.
He has sparked outrage by calling for HIV carriers to be put into forced isolation, attacking France's World Cup winning football team for not being white enough, or, most notoriously, describing the Nazi gas chambers as a "minor detail" in the history of World War II.
Val says and the truly horrendous thing is people still support them! God help us all if that ever did come to happen.
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