Le Pen narrows Macron’s lead in French race
PARIS (Reuters) — France’s presidential candidates battled for the popular vote on Thursday with far-right Marine Le Pen wooing fishermen and Emmanuel Macron playing soccer as polls showed the centrist’s commanding lead narrow marginally.
As runner-up in last Sunday’s opening ballot, Le Pen remained the underdog, but several polls suggested she had made a more impressive start to the last lap of campaigning than Macron.
A daily Opinionway poll saw Macron’s predicted score dipping to 59 percent for the first time since mid-March.
A Harris survey showed Macron garnering 61 percent of voting intentions, but suggested momentum was on Le Pen’s side as the centrist’s lead narrowed by several percentage points.
Dressed in fishermen’s yellow oilskins, Le Pen, 48, grappled with a freshly caught octopus on a fishing boat out at sea first thing on Thursday. She told reporters on the quayside she would defend seafarers and all endangered sectors against invasive EU regulations.
“Let me warn you, that man (Macron) will destroy our entire social and economic structure,” she told a horde of journalists at Le Grau du Roi, a port west of Marseille.
Macron, a 39-year-old who did a stint as economy minister in the outgoing Socialist government before breaking away to launch his own political movement, mocked her photo opportunity.
“Madame Le Pen has gone fishing. Enjoy the outing. The exit from Europe that she is proposing will spell the end of French fisheries,” he tweeted.
Macron took his campaign to Sarcelles, a poor Parisian suburb with a large community of North African and subSaharan African descent where more than one in three young people are out of work, double the national average.
In stark contrast to Wednesday, when he was heckled by factory workers in northern France, the ex-banker was greeted to cheers and kicked a football around with youngsters.
He hit back at Le Pen’s attempts to portray herself as the woman of the people, accusing the trained lawyer, who was born and raised in a wealthy Paris suburb, of hypocrisy, making false promises and continuing the “xenophobic” policies of her father JeanMarie Le Pen.
“She is lying to you,” Macron said in the town, where the majority voted for the farleft in last week’s first round.
“France is not the vicious and repressive face that Mrs. Le Pen carries. I will not let her trivialize what the National Front is, which is a xenophobic party.”
Both contenders redoubled their attempts to paint the other as the candidate of the political establishment on Thursday and appealed for support from across the political spectrum after an election race that has alienated some voters.