Frontrunners hold rallies

Melenchon surge sparks alarm

PARIS, April 17, (AFP): The two frontrunners in the French presidential election, far-right leader Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, were staging rival rallies in Paris Monday, seeking to stay ahead of a fast-chasing pack just days before the vote.

After weeks of twists and turns, the unpredictable race has narrowed dramatically, with surveys suggesting four candidates are in contention to win one of the top two spots in the April 23 vote and progress to the runoff election a fortnight later.

Scandal-hit conservative Francois Fillon and radical leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon are steaming up behind the two frontrunners, and with around one in three of the French electorate still undecided, candidates are scrapping for every vote.

Le Pen and Macron, who have both scored as high as 25 percent in voter surveys, stood at 22 percent in the latest IPSOS poll, while Melenchon has surged to 20 percent and Fillon stands at 19.

Melenchon’s late surge -- and the possibility he could square off against Le Pen in the May 7 decider -- has sparked alarm over the future of the EU, as both candidates advocate withdrawing from the bloc for different reasons.

Outgoing President Francois Hollande weighed in on Saturday, saying Europe has “protected us against war” in the decades since World War II.

“Let us preserve

it instead of

In July, a Tunisian man living in France drove a cargo truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 86 and wounding hundreds. (AP) scapegoating it,” he said at a World War I centenary event in northern France.

Macron plans his biggest rally yet at the Bercy sports and concert hall, a venue with a capacity of 20,000.

The location near the economy ministry serves as a reminder that the relatively inexperienced Macron held the key economy portfolio for two years under his mentor Hollande.

The 39-year-old former Rothschild banker quit the Socialist government last year to form his “En Marche” (“On the Move”) party and launch his bid for power as a candidate “neither of the left nor of the right”.

En Marche says it has planned “1,000 events a day” including 163 public rallies until the official end of campaigning at midnight on Friday.

An aide to Macron said he would use Monday’s event to hit back at Le Pen’s accusation he is soft on Islamists.

“With Mr Macron, it would be Islamism on the move,” Le Pen, 48, said on Saturday in response to revelations that one of Macron’s top campaigners had criticised the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH).

Le Pen’s own rally will be at the 6,000-capacity Zenith concert hall in northeast Paris, with activists saying they plan protests outside the venue.

A protest is also expected in the southern port of Marseille on Wednesday where Le Pen plans another large rally.

‘Egg-throwing competition’:

While many Germans spent Easter Sunday engaged in a fun-filled hunts for chocolate eggs, residents of the western town of Horhausen passed their time throwing real eggs in a tradition that goes back several decades.

Local people braved the rain to stand in a field lobbing the brightly painted eggs as far as possible — without breaking them — to try to win a popular annual competition.

Each contestant was only allowed to throw one egg. Those that remained intact on impact were collected and handed out to participants, while the ones that broke were left for the birds to feast on. (RTRS)

‘End parliament boycott’:

Germany’s foreign minister on Monday called on