Trump’s pressure over Mexico wall
FRENCH PRESIDENT Francois Hollande has urged voters to choose centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron in the May 7 presidential run-off to keep out farright leader Marine Le Pen.
Speaking from the Elysee palace, Mr Hollande said Ms Le Pen’s platform of pulling out of the euro would devastate the country’s economy and threaten French liberty.
He said the far-right would “deeply divide France” at a time when the terror threat requires solidarity and cohesion.
Mr Macron was Mr Hollande’s top adviser on economic issues from 2012 to 2014, then economy minister in his Socialist government for two years.
In April 2016, he launched his own political movement, En Marche! (In Motion!) to prepare his presidential bid as an independent centrist candidate. He quit the government a few months later.
Mr Hollande’s intervention came as France’s defeated political mainstream united to urge voters to back Mr Macron.
Politicians on the moderate left and right, including the Socialist and Republicans party losers in Sunday’s first-round vote, sought to block Ms Le Pen’s path to power.
The mainstream parties were shut out of the presidency after the first round, which narrowed the presidential field from 11 to two. This election is widely seen as a litmus test for the populist wave which last year prompted the UK to vote to leave the European Union and led to Donald Trump being elected US presiare dent. The defeated far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, pointedly refused to back Mr Macron, and Ms Le Pen’s National Front is hoping to do the once-unthinkable and gain the support of voters historically opposed to a party long tainted by racism and anti-Semitism.
National Front vice president Steeve Brios said: “The voters who voted for Mr Melenchon angry voters. They can be in agreement with us.” He said that these voters can express a choice “outside the system”.
Choosing from inside the system is no longer an option, as voters rejected the two mainstream parties which have alternated power for decades in favour of Ms Le Pen and the untested Mr Macron, who has never held elected office and who founded his own political movement just last year.
Turnout was 78 per cent, down slightly from 79 per cent in the first round of presidential voting in 2012.
Francois Fillon, the scandalplagued conservative Republicans candidate, fared marginally better, coming in third with just shy of 20 per cent of the vote.
Both centre-right and centreleft fell in behind Mr Macron, whose optimistic vision of a tolerant France and a united Europe with open borders is a stark contrast to Ms Le Pen’s darker, inward-looking “French-first” platform, which calls for closed borders, tougher security, less immigration and dropping the euro to return to the French franc.
Ms Le Pen went on the offensive against Macron in her first public comments on Monday.
President Donald Trump is putting fresh pressure on congressional Democrats to pay for a controversial wall on the US-Mexico border as a funding deadline looms for the project – even if that pressure risks a possible government shutdown.
As Mr Trump approaches the symbolic 100-day mark for his administration this week, he is juggling a renewed healthcare push with his demands that a must-pass government funding bill should include money for the wall.