French voters shut out the country’s political mainstream from the presidency for the first time in the country’s modern history and yesterday found themselves being courted across the spectrum for the runoff election.
The May 7 runoff is to be between the populist Marine Le Pen and former French economics minister Emmanuel Macron, and politicians on the moderate left and right immediately urged voters to block Le Pen’s path to power.
The defeated far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, pointedly refused to do the same, and Le Pen’s National Front is hoping to do the once unthinkable and peel away voters historically opposed to a party long tainted by racism and anti-Semitism.
“The voters who voted for Mr Melenchon are angry voters. They can be in agreement with us,” National Front vice president Steeve Brios said.
He said they express a choice “outside the system.”
Choosing inside the system is no longer an option for French voters, who rejected the two mainstream parties that have alternated power for decades in favor of Le Pen and the untested Macron, who has never held elected office and who founded his own political movement just last year.
The Socialist candidate, former French prime minister Manuel Valls, whose party holds a majority in the legislature and whose French President Francois Hollande is the most unpopular in modern French record-keeping, got just 6 percent.
The conservative came in third with just shy of 20 percent of the vote.
“We are in a phase of decomposition, demolition, deconstruction,” Valls said. “We didn’t do the work — intellectual, ideological and political — on what the left is and we paid the price.”
Both center-right and center-left fell in behind Macron, whose optimistic vision of a tolerant France and a united Europe with open borders is a stark contrast to Le Pen’s darker, inward-looking “French-first” platform that calls for closed borders, tougher security, less immigration and dropping the shared euro to return to the French franc.
Le Pen offers an alternative for anyone skeptical of the EU and France’s role in it, National Front vice president Louis Aliot said.
“I’m not convinced that the French are willing to sign a blank check to Mr Macron,” he said.
However, Macron’s party spokesman Benjamin Griveaux said the far-right candidate is hardly a vector of change.
“She’s been in the political system for 30 years. She inherited her father’s party and we will undoubtedly have Le Pens running for the next 20 years, because after we had the father, we have the daughter and we will doubtless have the niece,” he said.
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