Alice Diop, whose documentaries have explored the lives of people in housing estates, wants to mobilise voters against the far right

The award-winning French film-maker Alice Diop has warned of “rampant racism” in France and launched a collective to mobilise residents of housing estates to vote in the snap election in an attempt to hold back the far right.

“For people like me it’s life or death,” said the acclaimed director, as Marine Le Pen’s far-right anti-immigration National Rally (RN) is forecast by pollsters to take the largest number of seats in the French parliament on 7 July and is seeking an absolute majority to form a government.

With the collapse of centrist parties, voters are caught between the National Rally, a left mired in controversy – or abstaining altogether

It’s a choice between the plague and cholera. Millions of French voters are agonising at the prospect of having to choose between a candidate of Marine Le Pen’s hard-right anti-immigration National Rally (Rassemblement National – RN) party and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left France Unbowed (La France Insoumise – LFI) movement in parliamentary election runoffs on 7 July.

Barring a dramatic comeback by President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc in the 30 June first round, the second ballot in roughly half of the 577 constituencies will pit a representative of Le Pen’s illiberal national populists against a candidate of the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front Populaire – NFP), a hastily cobbled-together alliance of leftwing parties dominated by Mélenchon’s radical leftists.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

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National Rally win may hamper bloc’s ability to get things done and pose existential question over French role

On the night her party swept to a crushing victory in European elections and France’s president triggered a political earthquake by dissolving parliament, Marine Le Pen, the longtime leader of the National Rally (RN), could not have been much clearer.

“Tonight’s message – including the dissolution – is also addressed to the leaders in Brussels,” she said. “This great victory for patriotic movements is in alignment with the direction of history … We are ready to take power if the people so wish.”

Opponents say party is ‘political heir’ of Vichy regime, which collaborated with Nazis, amid efforts to halt its rise

Political opponents of Marine Le Pen’s poll-leading National Rally are seizing on the far-right party’s history to try to mobilise voters against it in the run-up to France’s snap election.

Leftwing and centrist politicians have sought to remind voters that when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founded the party – originally named Front National – in 1972, its ranks included former members of a Waffen SS military unit under Nazi command during the second world war.