France's prime minister Manuel Valls used a speech at a meeting of European Socialists and Social Democrats in Bologna on Sunday to warn that members of his governing party in particular must unite for a common cause or face losing their grip on power, reports Deutsche Welle.
"We have to act differently. We have to speak differently," Valls said, while standing on the stage alongside Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi.
"We know what will be the terrible price of failure. In France, the extreme right of Marine Le Pen is at the gates of power," he warned, referring to the leader of the National Front.
"And I, as a man of the left, will never be able to resign myself to that because it will be the weakest who will be the first to suffer. And it will also be a terrible, perhaps fatal, blow to Europe."
Valls' words came at the end of a difficult week for President François Hollande and his Socialist government.
An IFOP opinion poll published on Friday found that if Hollande faced Le Pen in a run-off presidential vote now, Le Pen would win.
A separate poll conducted by IFOP for the Sunday paper Le Journal Du Dimanche found that 85 percent of those questioned did not want Hollande to even run again.
Read more of this report from Deutsche Welle.