Melenchon’s surge shakes up French presidential race
MARSEILLE: French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon drew tens of thousands of supporters to an open-air rally on Sunday, underlining his surging popularity just two weeks from the unpredictable election.
Polls show far-left Melenchon closing in on the frontrunners, 39-year-old centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen ahead of the April 23 first round, adding new drama to a rollercoaster campaign.
After strong performances in two televised debates, several new surveys this weekend showed him climbing to third position, with 18-19 percent of voters saying they would vote for him.
Speaking in Marseille, Melenchon said voters had a choice other than the extreme-right “condemning our great multi-colored people to hate itself” and fans of the free-market that “transforms suffering, misery and abandonment into gold and money.”
Left-leaning news magazine L’Obs commented that “the sudden emergence of Jean-Luc Melenchon among the four candidates with around 20 percent has shattered all the predictions, (and) is sowing doubt among the favorites.”
Analysts say forecasting the twostage election is even more difficult than usual, with an unusually high number of voters saying they plan to abstain or have not made up their minds.
Scandal-hit rightwinger Francois Fillon also held one of his biggest rallies so far, gathering thousands of supporters at a Paris conference hall.
The ex-premier is desperate to pick up momentum after a campaign dominated by allegations he paid his wife hundreds of thousands of euros for a fake parliamentary job.
“I am not asking you to love me — I am asking you to support me, because it is in France’s interest,” he told the crowds.
A former minister, who is also Fillon’s ally, admitted: “If he does not rise a few points (in the polls) this week, it’s over.”
Le Pen drew criticism on Monday for denying the French state’s responsibility for a mass arrest of Jews in Paris during World War II.
Le Pen, a frontrunner in the election, triggered an outcry with her comments on one of the darkest episodes of French history when the country was occupied by the Nazis during the war.
“I think France is not responsible for the Vel d’Hiv,” Le Pen said in a French media interview on Sunday, referring to the German-ordered roundup by French police of 13,000 Jews in Paris on July 16, 1942.
Most of the Jews were crammed in appalling conditions into the Velodrome d’Hiver or Winter Velodrome cycling stadium, colloquially known as the Vel d’Hiv, before being deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
“I think that, in general, if there are people responsible, it is those who were in power at the time. It is not France,” Le Pen said in comments that were condemned by other presidential candidates, a Jewish group and Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
“We have taught our children that they had every reason to criticize France, to see only the darkest historical aspects perhaps. I want them to be proud of being French once more,” she said in the interview with media organizations Le Figaro, RTL and LCI.
France has long struggled to come to terms with its role under the col- laborationist Vichy regime during World War II.
Altogether 76,000 Jews deported from France were killed.
In 1995, then President Jacques Chirac recognized that the French state shared responsibility for deporting Jews to Nazi death camps during the war, the first time a post-war French head of state had fully acknowledged France’s role.
Socialist President Francois Hollande in 2012 described the 1942 mass arrest as “a crime committed in France, by France.”
Her comments, just as campaigning officially opened in the election, could set back her attempts to clean up the image of her anti-immigration National Front and distance it from the anti-Semitic views of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party’s founder.