The champions of the French far right and far left in the presidential elections, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon, are to go head to head again in next month’s parliamentary vote.

It will be a Homeric battle in a way

Melenchon confirmed yesterday that he would be standing in Henin-Beaumont, a rundown former mining constituency near the northern city of Lille.

Le Pen, who is to make her candidacy official tomorrow, dismissed her rival as a “secondary phenomenon”.

“We want to gain a political victory which has both national and international meaning,” Melenchon told a press conference in Henin-Beaumont alongside a local Communist Party official.

“It will be a Homeric battle in a way, with extremely strong symbolism as it is the cradle of the French workers’ movement and also the place where Mrs Le Pen, in bravado, has decided to base herself,” he had predicted earlier.

Neither Le Pen, of the anti-immigrant National Front, nor Melenchon, of the Communist-backed Left Front, made it into the second round of this month’s vote for the presidency, won by centre-left candidate François Hollande.

But their battle ahead of the first round of voting on April 22 set the campaign alight and mobilised hundreds of thousands of supporters who were unimpressed by the centre ground’s responses to the economic crisis.

Next month, France goes to the polls again in a legislative election which will decide whether Hollande wins a working majority in parliament and whether Le Pen’s and Melenchon’s rival camps can win enough seats to influence debate.

Le Pen did better than expected in the presidential vote and Melenchon did worse, while in Henin-Beaumont Le Pen topped the poll with 31 per cent of voters backing her plan to pull France out of the euro, close its borders and expel immigrants.

Melenchon came fourth behind Le Pen, Hollande and the outgoing centre-right president Nicolas Sarkozy, but scored better there than he did on average nationally, with a score of 14.85 percent.

France will vote on June 10 in a first round legislative vote.

In any constituency where no candidate took more than 50 per cent, those who won the support of more than 12.5 per cent of eligible voters will face each other in a run-off.