Macron evokes 1995 skinhead attack as Le Pen distances herself from father

WITH JUST six days until a French presidential vote which could define Europe’s future, farright leader Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron were yesterday holding high-stakes rallies overlapping with nationwide May Day union marches.

The tense campaign interrupted the usual calm of the May Day holiday, as supporters of both candidates took to the streets, airwaves and social networks to weigh in on an election closely watched by global financial markets and France’s neighbours as a test of the global populist wave.

Ms Le Pen’s efforts to clean up the racism and anti-Semitism that has stained her anti-immigration National Front party’s past may be undermined by a parallel Paris event involving her father, Jean-Marie, who was expelled from the party over his extreme views.

Seeking to remind voters of the National Front’s dark past, Mr Macron paid homage to a Moroccan man thrown to his death in the Seine River on the sidelines of a far-right march more than two decades ago.

The National Front traditionally holds a march in central Paris on May 1 to honour Joan of Arc. At the 1995 event, a group of skinheads broke away and pushed 29-year-old Brahim Bourram off a bridge into the Seine, where he drowned. Then-party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen sought to distance himself from the attackers.

Standing on the bridge, Mr Macron hugged Bourram’s son Said, who was nine years old when his father was killed.

Said, now a chauffeur who supports Mr Macron, said his father was targeted “because he was a foreigner, an Arab. That is why I am fighting, to say no to racism”.

Mr Macron insisted that despite Marine Le Pen’s efforts to distance herself from her father’s anti-Semitism, “the roots are there, and they are very much alive”.

Marine Le Pen, holding a rally in an exhibition centre north of Paris, said on France-2 television that the political rupture with her father “is definitive”.