French candidates face TV grilling

Plot suspects had serial identities, multiple addresses

PARIS, April 20, (AFP): Candidates in the French presidential election have their final chance Thursday to speak to the nation in a series of televised interviews, in which scandal-hit conservative Francois Fillon has perhaps the most to prove.

All 11 candidates ranging from centrist Emmanuel Macron, who is narrowly leading the field, to minnows like Philippe Poutou, a Ford factory mechanic polling at 1.5 percent, will be interviewed on France 2 television for 15 minutes each.

With just three days to go until the first round on Sunday, the race — which could decide the future of the European Union — has tightened dramatically.

Opinion polls show Fillon and Macron, both pro-EU, locked in a tight four-way contest with far-right leader Marine Le Pen and hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon, both eurosceptics, making it the most unpredictable election in years.

Three surveys showed Macron having a slight edge over Le Pen with 2325 percent against 22-23 percent.

Fillon and Melenchon were tied at around 19 percent, after a late spurt that has put them within striking distance of the frontrunners.

The top two will advance to a runoff vote on May 7.

The spectre of an EU-bashing final between Le Pen and Melenchon — one of six possible line-ups — has caused nervousness among investors and thrust Europe to the top of the agenda.

Le Pen is proposing to a referendum on France’s membership of the EU after negotiations with Brussels on returning most key powers to national capitals. She also wants to scrap the euro and bring back the French franc.

Former prime minister Fillon has tried to rebound from an expenses scandal by presenting himself as a safe, experienced pair of hands at a time of deep global uncertainty following Britain’s decision to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s rise to the White House.

The 63-year-old candidate for the conservative Republicans party was the early leader in a race that had been seen as a walkover for the right after five years of troubled Socialist rule.

But he lost ground after being charged over accusations that he put his wife Penelope on the public payroll for a fictitious job as his parliamentary assistant, for which she was paid nearly 700,000 euros ($750,000).

Fillon used the arrest of two men apprehended in Marseille on suspicion of planning an attack on the election as an illustration of the dangers France faces — and the potential weaknesses of his opponents.

He aimed particular criticism at 39-year-old Macron, who spent two years as economy minister in the current Socialist government but has never held elected office.

“On the fight against radical Islam, as with everything else, Macron is vague,” Fillon told the right-leaning Le Figaro newspaper on Thursday.

Fillon confirmed that he had been warned by police last week that he had been earmarked as a “target” by jihadists.

Refused

Although prosecutors have refused to say if the two men arrested were aiming to attack a particular candidate, Fillon said of himself that it was “not out of the question that the candidate who has the most radical plan to take on Islamic terrorism be the target”.

He also returned to a message he has hammered home in recent weeks — that he alone among the leading candidates could secure a “strong” majority in the legislative elections that follow in June.

Le Pen has also sought to capitalise on the arrests in Marseille, accusing her rivals of turning a blind eye to Islamic terrorism.

Meanwhile, French investigators were trying Wednesday to piece together the backgrounds of two men arrested a few days before the presidential election as they were planning an “imminent” attack.

Clement Baur, 23, and Mahiedine Merabet, 29, were detained Tuesday by elite police and domestic intelligence agents in the southern city of Marseille.

Police had been searching for them since April 12 following the interception of a video in which the men pledged allegiance to the Islamic State jihadist group.

It has emerged that they had used a number of aliases, switched mobile phones frequently and used pre-paid bank cards to evade police.

“It took a while to find them,” said a source close to the investigation.

In the apartment they shared, police found a loaded Uzi sub-machine gun, two pistols, TATP explosives and a homemade grenade. An IS flag was also discovered. In related news, twenty members of a suspected jihadist network thought to have been behind a grenade attack on a Jewish grocery store in 2012 went on trial in France Thursday on terror charges.

The “Cannes-Torcy cell”, named for the towns where its members were based, is suspected of having planned several other attacks, and was considered the most dangerous to threaten the country when it was dismantled in 2012.

The trial opens as France is grappling with fresh fears of jihadist terror attacks, with the police arresting two men Tuesday suspected of plotting an assault just days before the presidential election — the first to be held in France under a state of emergency.

Analysts say the Cannes-Torcy network signalled a historic shift in France’s struggle against terrorism, to battling mass attacks by Islamic radicals inspired, or even guided, by foreigners.

Of the 20 men being tried by a special anti-terror tribunal in Paris, 10 are in prison and seven are on conditional release, while three others are being sought — two of whom are thought to be in Syria.

Aged 23 to 33, they are accused of plotting to stage several attacks on military and civilian targets, and of seeking to join jihadist ranks in Syria.