Le Pen's National Front admits EU parliament setback

PARIS (Reuters) - Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front admitted defeat on Tuesday after failing to win wide enough support to form a political group in European Parliament, dousing her ambition to lead an alliance of nationalists against Brussels.

Le Pen's anti-EU, anti-immigrant party caused a sensation in EU-wide elections in May when it topped the poll in France with 24.95 percent, beating both President Francois Hollande's Socialists and the centre-right UMP opposition.

Before the vote, Le Pen told Reuters a major objective was to form a group in parliament, which would have secured at least 20 million euros ($27.2 million)(15.97 million pounds) in funds, staff and speaking time. Le Pen said after the vote that she had "no doubt" the National Front would soon be able to do so.

But hours before Tuesday night's deadline, she was two countries short of the required representation from seven nations - highlighting the far-right populists' difficulties in agreeing among themselves.

"We have no group, for the time being in any case," National Front vice-president Florian Philippot told Reuters.

"But our deputies, who are more numerous than any other party in the French delegation, will be there to defend France under any circumstances, with or without a group."

Compounding Le Pen's embarrassment, she was outmanoeuvred by the UK Independence Party's Nigel Farage, who had refused to enter an alliance with her due to what he called the National Front's legacy of anti-Semitism.

Farage formed a Eurosceptic parliamentary group last week with 48 lawmakers after poaching a National Front defector whom Le Pen had tried to unseat after she advocated giving non-EU foreigners the right to vote in local elections.

The Front said in a statement it had missed the deadline due to its refusal to join forces with parties whose members had "incompatible" values, but it still saw a chance of forming a group before parliament's inaugural session on July 1.

That is still technically possible, although it would be too late to vie for influential posts such as a vice-presidency of the parliament and committee chairs.

Le Pen, who said she had enough deputies for a group and the backing of five national parties, lost her key partner in Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders after she held talks with a far-right Polish nationalist party.

Wilders pulled the plug in opposition to an alliance he called "a bridge too far" with Poland's KNP party, whose leader Janusz Korwin-Mikke has said that women are less intelligent than men and should not vote, and that there was no proof Nazi leader Adolf Hitler knew of the extermination of the Jews.

"The Freedom Party wants to form a parliamentary group but not at any price," Wilders told Reuters. He pledged to continue cooperating with other like-minded parties from Austria, Belgium and Italy as well as with the National Front.

As she sought to build support, Le Pen was dogged by fresh controversy at home when her father Jean-Marie, the National Front's founder and honorary life president, used a term linked to the French word 'oven' when talking about a Jewish singer.

Critics and Jewish groups said his remark was an implicit reference to Nazi death camps.

The National Front quickly stopped hosting Jean-Marie Le Pen's blog and his daughter disowned the comment. But the public spat between Marine and her father - who said he felt 'stabbed in the back' - revived the party's reputation for internal feuds and anti-Semitic undercurrents.

Whether her European Parliament setback will affect Marine Le Pen's rise in France is far from certain.

Both the ruling Socialists and the centre-right UMP are damaged by rifts over policy and tainted by financial scandals.

"It's better to be part of a group in parliament and after Le Pen's performance in the election she could have been expected to form one," said Jean-Yves Camus, a political analyst specialised in the far-right.

"But let's be clear: having or not having a group in parliament has zero effect on the National Front's agenda, which is to perform strongly in (2015) regional elections once again and qualify Marine Le Pen for round two of the (2017) presidential election."

(Reporting By Gerard Bon and Nicholas Vinocur; additional reporting by Julia Fioretti in Brussels and Magdalena Kolodziej in Warsaw; Editing by Paul Taylor)