Campaign rivals try to widen their appeal
USSEAU, France — French presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron hunted Saturday for votes in rural France where his far-right opponent, Marine Le Pen, is making inroads among people who feel left behind.
Back in Paris, Le Pen announced that if she wins the presidency in the May 7 runoff she will name former rival Nicolas Dupont-Aignan as her prime minister. The move aims to secure the nearly 1.7 million votes that the anti-European Union conservative got when he was eliminated from the presidential race in the first round of balloting.
Because many DupontAignan voters had already been expected to switch to Le Pen for her runoff against the centrist Macron, the alliance is unlikely to prove a major electoral boost for her.
Symbolically, however, it punctured a hole in hopes — expressed by mainstream politicians on both the left and the right — that French voters would unite against Le Pen’s extremism in the runoff. That happened in 2002, when her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, made it to the presidential runoff but lost overwhelmingly to Jacques Chirac.
At a news conference with Dupont-Aignan, Marine Le Pen celebrated his backing as the creation of “a great patriotic and republican alliance” and said they will campaign “hand-inhand.”
Macron said their far-right and right-wing alliance made the campaign battle lines even clearer.
“There is a reactionary, nationalist, antiEuropean right-wing that has structured itself and which, today, is an important political force,” he said. “Facing it is a progressive bloc that I represent, and which defends France.”
Macron is not saying yet who he would name to lead his government if he is elected. In a radio interview Saturday, he merely said he has “people in mind.”
Venturing into rural France to combat Le Pen’s arguments that he represents just the bigcity elite, the former economy minister plugged his proposals to reverse the economic and social decline in farming areas. Macron promised to modernize phone and internet connections in rural areas and vigorously defended the EU as an essential market for French farmers.
During an impromptu tour of the farmers’ market in the central town of Poitiers, Macron listened to a grain farmer complain about low-price competition from other EU countries and a vegetable farmer lament about the difficulty of getting loans to upgrade farm equipment.
Macron rebuffed Le Pen’s criticisms of the EU with a vigorous defense of European free trade, saying her plans to leave the bloc and its agricultural aid program would spell the end of French farming.
Le Pen has made the plight of French farmers a theme of her campaign, citing farm closures, rural poverty and farmers’ suicides.