NEWS ANALYSIS : Victory Empty One for French Far Right : Election: Despite its best showing ever, the National Front Party failed to win the political base it sought.

Pushing its hate-filled, anti-Establishment message across a politically disillusioned France, the National Front Party of extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen had its best showing ever in nationwide regional elections on Sunday.

But the virulently anti-immigrant political party, Western Europe’s most powerful far right political movement to rise on the Continent since the end of World War II, failed to bring home the territorial trophy it sought in the Mediterranean coastal cities of Nice and Marseilles.

Despite its 14% national tally, and even higher scores here in the French south, the National Front was unable to gain the political beachhead it wanted to establish itself as a legitimate contender for power. In the conservative Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region between the Rhone River delta and the Italian border, National Front leaders had hoped to dispel the party’s image as an unelectable populist movement of protest.

“The region is a symbol,” Le Pen said in an interview with the newspaper Figaro before the vote, “which we can use to win power.”

But in the Nice metropolitan region where he was a candidate, Le Pen was defeated by a patrician lawyer, Suzanne Sauvaigo, whose last-minute surge put a damper on Le Pen’s personal ambitions to become mayor of Nice, a key position for controlling the Riviera region.

In the Alpes-Maritime region, Sauvaigo finished three percentage points ahead of Le Pen.

Within the city limits, Le Pen finished first, capturing 31% to Sauvaigo’s 27% and 19% for the Socialist-backed candidate, Leon Schwartzenberg. But he fell far short of his goal of 40% that would have made him a front-runner for the Nice mayoralty when it comes up again in 1995.

“It was a Pyrrhic victory that rubbed out his hopes for City Hall,” commented Pierre Dany, editor of the daily newspaper Nice-Matin.

At a wee-hours post-election celebration Monday in a resort hotel on the Bay of Angels in Nice, Le Pen tried to put a good face on the vote. But disappointment was obvious on the florid visage of the leader whose skillful oratory moves his crowds of supporters into venomous frenzies against immigrants, minorities and the French left.

Like a sailor on a swaying deck, Le Pen stood feet apart and braced in front of a pair of hotel televisions, a remote control clenched in each hand, as his hoped-for victory in the French south evaporated on the screens before him.

He complained of “terrorist” tactics by the Socialist government that, in several instances, ordered local administrators to ban National Front rallies in public meeting halls. He raged against what he called a media smear campaign against him. Jumping from one channel to another with his remotes, he came upon a late-night monster movie featuring a giant winged beast, teeth dripping with blood.

“There--see there--that’s who they think is Le Pen,” he said, turning to his cohorts for confirmation.

In the ornate salon of the Westminster Hotel on the Nice Corniche, the victory Champagne was turning flat in half-emptied bottles. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the avatar of Europe’s revived far right, looked more like a loser than the winner he claimed to be.

Interviewed in her office in the nearby coastal city of Cagnes-sur-Mer, where she is the mayor, Sauvaigo breathed a sigh of relief. Recruited by former French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac to lead the moderate rightist forces against Le Pen, the 61-year-old grandmother, widow of a French Resistance hero, said at first she had doubted her chances to win.

“If there ever was a potential fiefdom of the National Front it was here in the Cote d’Azur,” she said. Not only did Le Pen have natural supporters among the 300,000 former French Algerian colonialists, the pieds noirs, but high crime in the cities had attracted many others to his promises to expel immigrants and revive the death penalty.

“I think he expected to win 40% of the vote,” Sauvaigo said, inhaling on a filtered cigarette as a gust of mistral wind banged the shutters of the city hall. “He had all the conditions he needed for a triumph. If he had won the election in the dramatic way he hoped, it would have given him momentum.”

Early opinion polls showed Le Pen headed to his goal. But a much-higher-than-expected turnout in the Nice region--79% instead of a predicted 50%--worked against him.

The National Front has been a factor in the French political scene since the parliamentary elections of 1986, when 35 National Front candidates won election to the National Assembly. Since then the party has shown steady gains in each subsequent election, winning 10% of the vote in the 1988 parliamentary elections, nearly 12% in the 1989 elections for the European Parliament and 14% in Sunday’s regional elections.

But by setting its goals for a much higher 17% to 20% of the national vote and targeting the Nice region for its geographic ambitions, the National Front set itself up for a disappointment in the regional elections.

“This was a real defeat in a now-or-never election for Le Pen,” Sauvaigo said, “I think it may put the brakes on his progression.”