Far-right French presidential candidate criticised over ‘Killer Macron’ chant at rally
Emmanuel Macron has said the farright presidential candidate Éric Zemmour might need a free hearing aid if he failed to notice the chanting of “Macron assassin” at a rally on Sunday.
The anti-immigration former TV pundit, who has insisted he did not hear the crowd, had evoked three notorious criminal attacks in France – two of them antisemitic, the third carried out by a jihadist – and accused the state of laxity when the chants calling the French president a murderer began.
Video of the event, attended by thousands, shows Zemmour waiting until the crowd quietened before continuing his address.
Macron – on a tour of Dijon as the presidential election campaign officially began on Monday – said Zemmour’s behaviour in letting the crowd continue chanting was either “undignified” or that he must have hearing problems. He responded with humour, calling on him to “profit” from his health reforms that meant hearing aids were now reimbursed by the health system.
“I invited the hard-of-hearing candidate to equip himself [with one] for nothing,” Macron said.
Valérie Pécresse, the candidate for the centre-right Les Républicains, was also among those to criticise Zemmour for letting the crowd continue chanting.
“I will fight the outgoing president with all my strength, but to let an opponent be called a murderer is dangerous for the republic. This is certainly not the right! This is not my France,” Pécresse tweeted.
Christophe Castaner, the president of the governing LREM group in the Assemblée
nationale, said Zemmour was “irresponsible” for letting the chanting continue. Zemmour’s team said their candidate had not heard the crowd.
As the official campaign opened, with rules giving all 12 candidates an equal chance to be heard by voters, the latest poll by OpinionWay for the French financial newspaper Les Echos showed Emmanuel Macron on 28% of the first-round vote, followed by the far-right Marine Le Pen on 21%. Behind them Jean-Luc Mélenchon has risen to 14%, with Pécresse on 11% and Zemmour on 10%.
Polls suggest Macron would comfortably win a run-off against Le Pen, but leading political scientists have warned voters against assuming the result is a foregone conclusion and not voting.
With less than two weeks to go, Dominique Reynié, the head of Fondapol, an influential thinktank, said anything could happen.
Many of the 12 candidates have been campaigning for months but the final fortnight in the run-up to the firstround vote on 10 April sees the intro