French election: Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon both vie for working class votes

Melenchon's rise in the polls challenges the working-class wing of the National Front's support...the voters(a large number of whom were former PCF supporters or the children of such supporters)who displaced their anger at the political/economic status quo off of the capitalists and onto immigrants.  Anything that threatens the FN ultimately threatens not only Sarkozy's party but the enture upper-class project both in France and throughout Europe.  For that reason, you might start seeing covert funding being slipped to the FN in the last days of the campaign.

If Melenchon succeeds in significantly reducing Le Pen's vote total, it ultimately threatens French and international capital, since both depend on deflectionist movements like the FN(or the far right parties in Germany, The Netherlands and other places)to divide working-class people and reduce the effectiveness of class-based resistance to neoliberalism.

Nothing new here...it's half the reason the captains of German industry started bankrolling the guy with the little moustache in the late 1920's.