French election a clash of 2 visions
PRO-EU MACRON VS LE PEN’S NATIONALISM Whoever wins presidential race will make history.
The battle to become France’s next president boils down to a sharp clash of contrasting visions. In one corner is centrist Emmanuel Macron, with his pro-globalisation, pro-EU world view.
In the other, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who champions “nationalism” and a “Francefirst” approach.
“The country Mr Macron wants is no longer France, it’s a space, a wasteland, a trading room where there are only consumers and producers,” Le Pen told thousands of supporters at a recent meeting in Nice.
Macron has a starkly different message: “I will be ... the voice of hope for our country and for Europe,” he said after the April 23 first-round vote.
Le Pen and Macron, who says he is “neither of the left nor the right”, eliminated France’s traditional political forces to reach the May 7 runoff.
The 39-year-old former investment banker, who had never before stood for election, started his centrist movement only 12 months ago, but is now on the cusp of becoming France’s youngest president.
Despite his lack of political experience, polls currently suggest he should beat Le Pen by around 20 percentage points.
President Francois Hollande launched Macron’s political career, picking him as an economic adviser and then parachuting him into his Socialist government as economy minister.
Sensing a worldwide shift away from established parties, Macron turned his back on Hollande and quit the Cabinet last August to concentrate on building his own centrist political movement, “En Marche” (On the Move).
Since then, he has amassed more than 250 000 members and confounded critics who said his appeal would not reach beyond young, urban professionals.
In politics as well as his personal life, Macron has broken traditions. The theatre and poetry lover from a middle-class family in Amiens, northeast France, fell for his secondary school drama teacher, Brigitte Trogneux.
A 64-year-old mother-of-three, a quarter of a century older than Macron, she left her husband and married the prodigy in 2007.
Unlike Macron, 48-year-old Le Pen is steeped in hard-edged politics. Her pugnacious father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, reached the runoff of the 2002 presidential election, but was beaten by the centre-right Jacques Chirac.
Fifteen years later, his gravel-voiced daughter believes she can become France’s first woman president and the first from the National Front party that her father founded. – AFP