Support for Fillon up after poll tips him for top post
PARIS: France’s centre-right yesterday rallied behind free market reformist Francois Fillon as its candidate for president after a snap opinion poll showed him the clear favourite to beat far-right leader Marine Le Pen in an election showdown next year.
Fillon, a former prime minister who vowed to change France’s “software” with an assault on public sector spending, moved one step closer to the Elysee by securing a resounding victory over Alain Juppe in the Les Republicains primary vote on Sunday. The ruling Socialists, meanwhile, sought to quell talk of a fallout between deeply unpopular President Francois Hollande and his prime minister, Manuel Valls, over which of them should seek the party ticket in their primary set for January.
Opinion polls show, though, that whoever does run for the Left is likely to be a very distant third behind Fillon and the National Front (FN) leader Le Pen in the election’s first round in April.
Fillon, 62, easily saw off Juppe, another former prime minister, by securing two-thirds of the vote.
“When a candidate wins with a score of that size – two thirds – it creates a natural momentum, a centre of gravity and a unifying force,” Bruno Ratailleau, a Fillon ally and senator from western France, told RTL radio.
Ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he ousted in the first round of the conservatives’ primary, and Juppe had both been given far better odds of winning the ticket.
Both men rallied behind the 62-year-old Fillon after his triumph.
But Fillon’s hard-line reform plans – cutting public spending by €100 billion (R1.5 trillion) over five years, scrapping a tax on the wealthy and pushing the retirement age to 65 and cutting public sector jobs – hand a glimmer of opportunity to Hollande and his Socialists, and the broader French Left.
His plans also set him apart from the anti-euro, anti-immigration Le Pen’s more pro-worker policies.
By contrast, his socially conservative views such as his deep reservations about abortion and gay marriage could win him votes at her expense in a traditionally Catholic, if formally secular, country.
Under the leadership of Le Pen, who took over from her father JeanMarie in 2011, the FN has switched from an economically liberal, prosmall business party to one that promises to lower the retirement age and guarantee France’s generous welfare safety net. – Reuters