Gloves off as French election goes to the wire
LE PEN CAMP TAKES AIM AT WHAT THEY SEE AS MACRON’S WEAK SPOTS — PRIVILEGED BACKGROUND AND ROLE IN DISCREDITED GOVERNMENT
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.
As both sides looked to court support now from their defeated rivals for the crucial May vote, Le Pen’s camp took aim at what they see 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 completely 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 already”.
“That was disdainful towards the French people,” Philippot said. Macron’s victory dinner celebrations at Paris’s upscale Rotonde restaurant amounted to “bling-bling biz,” he said.
Though Macron, 39, 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 per cent of the votes against Le Pen’s 21.53.A Harris survey saw Macron going on to win the runoff against her by 64 per cent to 36. An Ipsos/Sopra Steria poll gave a similar result.
Keen to avoid repetition
Ahead of 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 runoff against the far left’s JeanLuc Melenchon. The communistbacked candidate, who made a late surge in opinion polls, finished in fourth place.
Le Pen will be keen to avoid a repetition of 2002 when her father and National Front founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, got through to the second round in a surprise vote but went on to lose in a humiliating landslide against rightwing president Jacques Chirac.
Without waiting for figures from the count, two defeated candidates — conservative Francois Fillon and socialist Benoit Hamon — urged their supporters now to throw their energies into backing Macron to stop any chance of victory by Le Pen, whose anti-immigration and anti-Europe policies they said spelt disaster for France.
Melenchon declined to back either of the two. In a victory speech Macron told supporters: “In one year, we have changed the face of French politics.”