Election hopefuls focus on fishing

French presidential candidates Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron clashed over the future of the fishing industry.

The exchange marked a return to more traditional campaigning after the extraordinary “battle of Whirlpool”, when both candidates sought to harness France’s blue-collar vote at a threatened home appliances factory.

The anti-EU far-right populist Ms Le Pen was up before dawn to board a trawler on the Mediterranean. The trip was her latest TV-friendly effort to portray herself as the candidate of France’s workers against centrist Mr Macron, whom she paints as the candidate of the financial, political and pro-EU elite. Ms Le Pen said after her voyage: “My grandfather was a fisherman, so I am in my element.”

She said France will take back control of its

“Europe’s exit she proposes, it’s the end of French fishing”

maritime policies if she is elected in the secondround vote on May 7.

Mr Macron fired back, saying her proposals to take France out of the EU would sink France’s fishing industry.

“Europe’s exit she proposes, it’s the end of French fishing. Think about it,” he tweeted.

Ms Le Pen continued to hammer home the blue-collar theme she sought to take ownership of on Wednesday with a visit to the threatened Whirlpool clothesdryer factory in northern France. That put Mr Macron on the defensive and prompted him to meet angry Whirlpool workers later that day.

He was whistled and booed when he first arrived amid chaotic scenes. But he stood his ground, patiently and at times passionately debating with workers in often heated exchanges how to stop French jobs from moving abroad.