Far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen on Wednesday turned an appliance factory into a battleground for the blue-collar vote, upstaging rival Emmanuel Macron with a surprise campaign stop at the plant threatened with closure.
Chaotic scenes followed as Macron, a pro-EU centrist, sought to wrestle back the initiative by making his own, impromptu stop at the Whirlpool clothes-dryer plant in Amiens, spending more than an hour in Le Pen’s wake trying to reason with angry employees who asked why the former finance minister had not visited earlier.
The drama, broadcast live on French news channels, transformed the plant in northern France into a symbol of the diametrically opposed campaigns before the runoff election on Sunday next week.
Photo: AP
As Macron met elsewhere with the workers’ union leaders, Le Pen displayed her political guile by grabbing the spotlight and popping up outside the factory itself.
Surrounded by employees, she declared herself the workers’ candidate and vowed that if elected, she would not let the factory close.
“We’ll get you out of here,” Le Pen said as she hugged a woman in the crowd outside the plant. “I am the candidate of workers, the candidate of the French who don’t want their jobs taken away.”
Her wily campaign maneuver stole Macron’s thunder and put him on the defensive. It prompted him to make his own trip to the factory a few hours later — which quickly looked like he had fallen into a trap set by Le Pen.
Live television coverage of his visit looked chaotic and potentially damaging, with people whistling, booing and chanting “Marine, president” in the background.
However, Macron held his ground. Where Le Pen’s visit was short, Macron spent more than an hour patiently — and at times passionately — explaining in often-heated exchanges that he would not be able to stop companies from laying off workers.
“I won’t lie to you,” he said. “There is no miracle recipe.”
Because production at the plant is due to stop next year and move to Poland, the workers’ plight is a prickly issue for Macron as he campaigns on a pro-EU platform.
Le Pen seized on Whirlpool as a sign of the EU’s ills, calling it “the symbol of this odious globalization, which leads to plants moving abroad, destroying thousands of jobs.”
During an evening political rally in nearby Arras, Macron tried to reverse the unflattering image he gave in the afternoon.
He vehemently attacked Le Pen, saying she “stirs up hatred, lies, speaks about fears in order to use them, but gives no answers.”
While Le Pen presents herself as an anti-establishment candidate, Macron said that she is “the heiress of this system. She was born in a party castle, even if she claims to be from the people.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate