Le Pen and Macron clash in no-holds-barred debate in France
PARIS — The only faceto-face televised debate between France’s presidential candidates turned into an uncivil, no-holds-barred head-on clash of styles, politics and personalities Wednesday.
Emmanuel Macron called his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen a “parasite” who would lead the country into civil war. She painted the former banker as a lackey of big business who is soft on Islamic extremism.
Neither landed a knockout blow in the 2 1/2-hour primetime slugfest — but not for lack of trying. The tone was ill-tempered from the get-go, with no common ground or love lost between the two candidates and their polar opposite plans and visions for France. Both sought to destabilize each other and neither really succeeded.
For the large cohort of voters who remain undecided, the debate at least had the merit of making abundantly
clear the stark choice facing them at the ballot box Sunday.
Neither candidate announced major shifts in their policy platforms. They instead spent much of their carefully monitored allotments of time attacking each other — often personally.
Le Pen’s choicest barb came as she argued that Macron, if elected, would be in the pocket of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Either way France will be led by a woman; either me or Madame Merkel,” she said derisively.
Macron gave as good
as he got and, at times, got the upper hand with his pithy slights. In the closing minutes, he used a sharptongued monologue to target one of Le Pen’s biggest vulnerabilities: her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme-right former presidential candidate repeatedly convicted for hate speech and who founded her party, the National Front.
Throughout, Macron portrayed Marine Le Pen as an empty shell, shaky on details and facts, seeking to profit politically by stirring up hatred and the anger of French voters — a dominant theme of the campaign — without feasible proposals. He called her “the high priestess of fear.”
“Your project consists of telling the French people, ‘This person is horrible.’ It’s to cast dirt. It’s to lead a campaign of lies and falsifications. Your project lives off fear and lies. That’s what sustains you. That’s what sustained your father for decades. That’s what nourished the extreme right and that is what created you,” Macron said. “You are its parasite.”
“What class!” Le Pen retorted.
One of the most heated exchanges was on terrorism — a top concern for Le Pen’s voters and many French in the wake of repeated attacks since 2015. Saying Islamic extremists must be “eradicated,” Le Pen said Macron wouldn’t be up to the task.
“You won’t do that,” she charged.
Saying France’s fight against terror would be his priority if elected, Macron countered that Le Pen’s anti-terror plans would play into extremists’ hands and divide France.
“The trap they’re setting for us, the one that you’re proposing, is civil war. What the terrorists expect is division among ourselves. What the terrorists expect is heinous speech,” Macron said.
Sitting opposite one another at a round table, the debate quickly became a shouting match. She had piles of notes in colored folders, and referred to them occasionally. His side of the table was sparser, with just a few sheets of paper. He at times rested his chin on his hands as she spoke, fixing her in his gaze and smiling wryly at her barbs.