Defections boost Macron in French presidential race, say opinion polls
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“The President himself and others in the Trump transition team were clearly put into intelligence reports,” Nunes told reporters.
French presidential election frontrunner Emmanuel Macron saw his lead in the polls bolstered by news on Thursday that two members of the government were deserting the official Socialist Party contender to back the 39-year-old centrist.
The defections included one major catch — Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, a Socialist Party grandee who has been both a close ally and friend of outgoing President Francois Hollande for nearly 40 years.
Macron, who has never held elected office, has gatecrashed the leadership contest with a pledge to transcend the long-established divide of Left-versusRight politics with an programme for cross-partisan government.
His position was confirmed by a Harris Interactive poll of more than 6,000 voters which showed Macron coming first in a first round of voting on April 23 and then trouncing far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the two-way runoff on May 7.
The second defection was that of Thierry Braillard, a junior sports minister.
Earlier this week, biodiversity minister Barbara Pompili, another junior member of the Socialist leadership, switched allegiance to Macron rather than back Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon.
All this is bad news for Hamon who has been struggling in fourth place in the polls for weeks and fell to fifth spot in the Harris poll.
Only the two top candidates in the April 23 opening round, which all opinion polls say will be Macron and Le Pen, can go through to the May 7 runoff.
Hollande, the first president not to seek re-election since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1962, had appealed his government’s to ministers to refrain at least until the end of this week from taking pre-election positions. REUTERS