Macron in lead as visions clash

LE PEN CALLS HIM HOLLANDE’S CLONE

Centrist presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron and his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen, yesterday attacked each other’s vision of France and the role it should play in Europe against a background of May Day rallies and protests.

Macron sought to paint National Front (FN) candidate Le Pen as an extremist while she portrayed him as a clone of socialist President Francois Hollande, under whom he served as economy minister from 2014 to last year.

An opinion poll showed Macron leading Le Pen by 61% to 39% ahead of Sunday’s election, seen as the most crucial in decades.

On offer is a choice between his vision of closer integration with a modernised European Union and her calls to cut immigration and take the country out of the euro.

“I will fight up until the very last second, not only against her programme but also her idea of what constitutes democracy and the French Republic,” said Macron, an independent backed by En Marche! (Onwards!), a party he set up himself a year ago.

He was speaking after paying tribute to a young Moroccan man who drowned in the Seine 22 years ago after being pushed into the water by skinheads on the fringes of a May Day rally by the FN, then led by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie.

Campaigning in Villepinte, a suburb north of the capital, Le Pen told a rally: “Emmanuel Macron is just Francois Hollande who wants to stay and who is hanging on to power like a barnacle.”

She called for France to reclaim its “independence” from the EU but made no mention of her proposal to drop the euro.

Le Pen has worked hard to cleanse the FN of xenophobic and anti-Semitic associations and make it more appealing to a wider electorate. She said at the weekend she had no more contact with her father and was not responsible for his “unacceptable comments”.

Le Pen Sr gave his own May Day speech at a statue of national heroine Joan of Arc.

His speech before a crowd of a few hundred supporters drew chants of “France for the French!” and “Islam out of France!”

At other rallies, trade unionists and left-wing activists sought to turn the workers’ holiday into a day of national solidarity against FN. –