Macron, Le Pen pay homage to slain officer

Presidential contenders join hundreds of mourners to honour the policeman killed in the Champs Elysees terror attack |

French far-right veteran JeanMarie Le Pen said yesterday his daughter Marine, who faces centrist Emmanuel Macron in a May 7 presidential run-off, should have campaigned more aggressively for Sunday’s first round, following the example of Donald Trump.

With 7.5 million votes, Marine Le Pen beat the National Front party’s previous election record on Sunday but failed to pip pro-EU Macron to the first place.

The intervention by her father follows her announcement on Monday that she plans to step back from day-to-day management of the far-right party he founded ahead of the run-off and marks the latest tussle between the two of them over its future direction.

“I think her campaign was too laid-back. If I’d been in her place I would have had a Trump-like campaign, a more open one, very aggressive against those responsible for the decadence of our country, whether left or right,” 88-yearold Jean-Marie Le Pen told RTL radio.

The two have been at odds since Marine Le Pen launched moves to clean the National Front’s image of xenophobic associations in the run-up to the campaign for the 2017 presidency.

Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the world in 2002 by qualifying for the second round of the presidential election and then went on to lose in a landslide to conservative Jacques Chirac.

He was frequently accused of making xenophobic and anti-Semitic statements and Le Pen expelled him from the party in 2015.