Whatever the system, Mr Le Pen and his party have been getting a steady 10-15% of the vote for the past 15 years.
Yet, by splitting the right's vote in the critical second round (when all but a dozen contests were decided), Mr Le Pen's party may well have cost the mainstream conservatives their widely predicted victory.
The feisty Ms Le Pen, who has rid the party of its jack-booted image, is unlikely to repeat that feat.
Judith Waintraub in Le Figaro notes that this was the party's first leadership contest to be decided by a vote among party members.
And in an unprecedented effort to bridge rifts between reformist and conservative camps, Vietnam's leaders chose a military figure, Le Kha Phieu, to lead the party and maintain political stability.
In an interview with French television on Monday, he also alleged that the former head of the far-right National Front party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, funded part of his 1988 presidential campaign with money from Gabon's late ex-president Omar Bongo, AFP reports.
She also thinks Marine Le Pen could be an important asset for the party.
Sarkozy's fate was ultimately sealed by the decision of supporters of Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration National Front party not to vote for him in the second round of the French presidential election.
Most probably we will be dealing with an ultra-right nationalistic party, like that of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France.
In January she took over the party leadership from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who stunned France by reaching the second round of the presidential election in 2002.
While Le Matin points to a low level of involvement by Algerians in party meetings as being indicative of a "socio-political rift between those in power and the citizens".
Ms. Le Pen, a divorced mother of three, succeeded her father as party head last year and announced she would run for president.
Marine Le Pen, taking the lead from her father, has then strengthened the party, although not as much as feared in the first results yesterday night were she was granted 20%.
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The French right-of-centre newspaper Le Figaro reports that Mr Hollande's announcement on the TF1 channel appeared to take party colleagues by surprise.
Ms. Le Pen's performance in Sunday's vote suggests that her economic message resonated beyond her party's base.
The new UMP leader insisted reconciliation within the party would be "easy and natural", according to the centre-right newspaper Le Figaro.
In the 2002 presidential election, even without a split in the party, the left paid a heavy price for its fragmentation: the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen evicted Mr Jospin in the first round.
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