Tue, Apr 12, 2022 page1

• Macron, Le Pen begin battle for French presidency

  • AFP, PARIS
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  French President Emmanuel Macron and his right-wing rival, Marine Le Pen, yesterday began a final two weeks of bruising campaigning for the French presidency in a runoff that polls predict risks being tight.

  With 97 percent of the votes counted, Macron came in first in Sunday’s first round of voting with 27.6 percent of the vote. Le Pen was second with 23.4 percent.

  As the top two finishers, they advance to a second round on April 24.

  

  French President Emmanuel Macron appears on stage at his election campaign headquarters in Paris on Sunday.

  Photo: Reuters

  Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon came close to beating Le Pen for second spot after a late surge gave him a score of just lass than 22 percent.

  The duel between Macron and Le Pen is a rerun of the 2017 election final from which Macron emerged victorious with 66 percent, but this time polls predict a closer contest.

  “Make no mistake: Nothing is decided,” Macron told cheering supporters at his campaign headquarters on Sunday night. “The debate that we are going to have over the next two weeks will be decisive for our country and Europe.”

  Macron said he would be out campaigning yesterday in northern France, while Le Pen was set to meet her campaign team before resuming her months-long grassroots efforts in small towns and rural France later in the week.

  “A sad repetition,” left-leaning Liberation called the Macron-Le Pen duel yesterday, adding: “This time it’s really scary.”

  The candidates from France’s traditional parties of government — the Socialists and the Republicans — suffered humiliating defeats.

  Polls gauging second-round voting intentions mostly point to about 53 percent for Macron and 47 percent for Le Pen.

  However, one poll by the Ifop-Fiducial group said that Macron could have only a razor-thin win with 51 percent versus 49 percent.

  As well as campaigning on the merits of their respective programs, both candidates would also be scrambling to woo voters of their defeated first-round rivals.

  In a boost for the president, Communist Party candidate Fabien Roussel, Socialist Anne Hidalgo, Yannick Jadot of the Greens and Republicans candidate Valerie Pecresse said they would vote for him to prevent the far-right leader coming to power.

  Without backing Macron, Melenchon in a crucial move also told his supporters not to give a “single vote” to Le Pen.

  However, Le Pen’s right-wing rival Eric Zemmour, who garnered just over 7 percent on Sunday, has already thrown his weight behind her, and while Macron can expect to pick up many center-left and center-right votes, he might struggle to persuade Melenchon voters to back him, analysts said.

  Le Pen, 53, said the runoff would present “a fundamental choice between two visions.”

  It would be a “choice of society and even of civilization,” she said.

  The election campaign has been overshadowed by the war in Ukraine, with surging prices making the cost of living a key issue.

  The vote’s outcome would have major implications for the EU, which Le Pen says she wants to radically reform. She has also said she wants to pull out of NATO’s joint military command.

  Macron on Sunday said that he did not want a France which “once out of Europe, would only have the international alliance of populists and xenophobes as allies. That’s not us.”
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