Gloves come off in French presidential poll
PARIS: Far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s top aide sharply attacked her centrist opponent Emmanuel Macron, who is favourite to beat her for the French presidency, as campaigning for the final round on May 7 got under way within hours of first-round results.
Global markets reacted with relief to Sunday’s outcome which broke a pattern of anti-establishment election shocks in which Britons voted to quit the EU and Donald Trump was elected US president.
The euro reached five-month peaks while European shares rose sharply on the likelihood that the 39-year-old Macron will win the presidency in the run-off against Le Pen. Her pledge to ditch the euro and possibly quit the EU has unnerved markets.
As both sides looked to court support from their defeated rivals for the crucial May vote, Le Pen’s camp took aim at what they saw as Macron’s weak spots – his privileged banker background and his role as economy minister in a discredited Socialist government of outgoing President Francois Hollande.
“Emmanuel is not a patriot. He sold off national companies. He criticised French culture,” Florian Philippot, deputy leader of Le Pen’s National Front told BFM TV, saying she and Macron held different visions of France.
Philippot called the independent centrist and former investment banker arrogant and said that in Sunday night’s speech acclaiming his move into the second round “he was speaking as if he had won”.
“That was disdainful towards the French people,” Phillipot said. Macron’s victory dinner celebrations at Paris’s upscale Rotonde restaurant amounted to “blingbling biz”, he said.
Though Macron is a comparative political novice who has never held elected office, new opinion polls on Sunday saw him easily winning the final clash against the 48-year-old Le Pen.
Interior ministry final figures in the highly-contested first round gave Macron 23.74% of the votes against Le Pen’s 21.53%. A Harris survey saw Macron going on to win the run-off against her by 64% to 36%. An Ipsos/Sopra Steria poll gave a similar result.
Before Sunday’s vote, markets had been contemplating a variety of nightmare scenarios for them, including one in which Le Pen would go through to a run-off against the far left’s Jean-Luc Melenchon. The communist-backed candidate, who made a late surge in opinion polls, finished fourth.
Le Pen will be keen to avoid a repetition of 2002 when her father, National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen got through to the second round in a surprise vote but lost in a landslide against right-wing president Jacques Chirac.
Analysts say Le Pen’s best chance is to paint him as a part of an elite aloof from ordinary French people.