UPDATE! France’s governing Socialists have suffered big losses in municipal elections, early results show, with the opposition UMP claiming victory and the far right celebrating further gains.

French voters will head to the polls on Sunday for a second round of local elections that are expected to bring more bad news for the country’s ruling socialists.In the first round, the Socialist Party had a surprise defeat in the town of Henin Beaumont, where the far-right National Front mayoral candidate scored an outright win. The National Front, historically a xenophobic party which whose former leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, described the Holocaust as a “detail” of the Second World War, has recently made gains by tapping into widespread belief that mainstream parties have abandoned working class voters.Al Jazeera’s Nadim Baba reports from Henin Beaumont.