“Marine Le Pen lies to people”Macron stressed during an interview with the newspaper Le Parisien, at a time when his rival is getting closer in the polls and even threatens the victory of the centrist in the runoff of April 24.
Macron leads the first round with 26% voting intention, followed by the far-right (22%) and the leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon (17%), according to the OpinionWay-Kéa Partners barometer. The advantage against Le Pen is reduced to 6 points in the ballot.
This Friday, on the eve of the day of reflection in which France will enter a bubble of silence without campaign or polls, the president tried to undermine the image of moderate and close to the problems of the people that Marine Le Pen has carved during the campaign.
“Its fundamentals haven’t changed. Your show is racist. It is an exit program from Europe, although she no longer says it clearly“, warned Macron, who seeks to revive the extremist image of the heiress of the National Front of Jean-Marie LePen.
The leader of the National Association (RN) has established herself in the final stretch as the candidate to defeat. Her far-right rival, Eric Zemmourwhose radical speech helped her to appear moderate, also attacked her, assuring that she “dreams” of allying herself with the left.
France seems headed to repeat the Macron-Le Pen duel of 2017, but the outcome seems more uncertain in a country that in the last five years has experienced social protests, a pandemic and fears the effects on the pocket of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Faced with this possible duel, the rest of the candidates are already beginning to position themselves, even before the first round. the socialist Anne Hidalgothe communist Fabien Roussel and the environmentalist Yannick Jadot They have already announced that they will call to prevent the victory of the extreme right in the second round.
But the traditional “republican front” will not be enough to isolate Marine Le Pen in the second round, the director of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, Gilles Finchelstein, explained to AFP, for whom this system is worn out, although it has not disappeared.
Symbol of this change, the candidate of the former governing right, the liberal Valerie Pecresse (The Republicans), assured that he will not give a voting slogan after the first round because “the French are free”, although he will reveal who he will vote for.
The “republican front” has already been activated twice in the recent history of France. In 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen went against all odds to the second round against the conservative Jacques Chiracwhich defeated him with more than 80% of votes, and in 2017.
But as in 2002, the result of the first round, which will be known on Sunday at 8:00 p.m. (3:00 p.m. in Argentina), may bring surprises. Mélenchon, driven by his image of a “useful vote” of an atomized left, hopes to go to the ballot.
This Friday, former minister Christiane Taubira, who tried in vain to be a candidate in the election, supported the leftist, since, faced with the “risk” that Le Pen “come to power”, voting for him is a way to “block the path” to the extreme right.
According to his party Francia Insumisa, Mélenchon also received the support of dozens of international personalities, such as former Brazilian presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, Ecuadorian Rafael Correa and Bolivian Evo Morales.
In the last hours of the campaign, the 12 candidates rush their last cartridges to mobilize the voters, especially when only 69% affirm that they will vote with certainty. Of these, one in three still doubts who to vote for, according to an Ipsos-Cevipof poll.
“It is the first election that reaches such an undecided rate,” said political scientist Pascal Perrineau, for whom this augurs “significant” uncertainty about who will be in charge of this world economic and nuclear power.
Source: Ambito
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