European leaders urge voters to pick Macron
PARIS: Just days before France’s crucial presidential run-off vote, the center-left leaders of Germany, Spain and Portugal urged French voters on Thursday to choose centrist President Emmanuel Macron over farright rival Marine Le Pen.
And in another sign of the wide international influence the result of Sunday’s French presidential vote will have, imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny also spoke up a day earlier, urging French voters to back Macron and alleging that Le Pen is too closely linked to Russian authorities.
Le Pen has faced scrutiny before over a 9 million euro ($9.7 million) loan that her party received in 2014 from the First Czech-Russian Bank and her 2017 visit to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin before the French presidential run-off that year.
In a column published on Thursday in several European newspapers, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa wrote that Sunday’s vote is “critical for France and all and every one of us in Europe”.
“It’s the election between a democratic candidate who believes that France’s strength broadens in a powerful and autonomous European Union and an extreme-right candidate who openly sides with those who attack our freedom and democracy, values based on the French ideas of Enlightenment,” the comment said without mentioning Macron or Le Pen by name.
The two rivals clashed bitterly in Wednesday’s televised debate.
Macron argued that the loan Le Pen’s party received in 2014 from a Czech-Russian bank made her unsuitable to deal with Moscow amid its invasion of Ukraine. He also said her plans to ban Muslim women in France from wearing headscarves in public would trigger “civil war” in the country that has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe.
Le Pen, in turn, sought to appeal to voters struggling with surging prices amid the fallout of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which she criticised. She said bringing down the cost of living would be her priority if elected as France’s first woman president.