France’s defeated parties unite to urge Macron victory over Le Pen
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FRANCE’S political mainstream, shut out of the presidency by an angry electorate, united yesterday to call on voters to back centrist Emmanuel Macron and reject Marine Le Pen’s populist nationalism.
Politicians on the moderate left and right, including the Socialist and Republicans party losers in Sunday’s first-round vote, maneuvered to block Le Pen’s path to power in the May 7 runoff.
Voters narrowed the presidential field from 11 to two. France’s presidential election is widely seen as a litmus test for the populist wave that last year prompted Britain to vote to leave the European Union and US voters to elect Donald Trump as president.
The defeated far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, pointedly refused to back Macron, 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 told reporters. He said that they express a choice “outside the system.”
Choosing from inside the system is no longer an option. Voters rejected the two mainstream parties that have alternated power for decades, in favor of Le Pen and the untested Macron, who has not held elected office and who founded his own political movement just last year.
Turnout was 78 percent, down slightly from 79 percent in 2012’s first round.
Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon, whose party holds a majority in the legislature, got just 6 percent.
Unpopular Socialist President Francois Hollande did not seek re-election.
“We are in a phase of decomposition, demolition, deconstruction,” former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls said. “We didn’t do the work — intellectual, ideological and political — on what the left is, and we paid the price.”
Francois Fillon, the scandal-plagued conservative Republicans candidate, fared marginally better, coming in third with just shy of 20 percent of the vote.
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 in stark contrast to Le Pen’s darker, inward-looking “French-first” platform that calls for closed borders, tougher security, less immigration and dropping the euro currency to return to the French franc.
Le Pen went on the offensive against Macron in her first public comments yesterday.
“He is a hysterical, radical ‘Europeanist.’ He is for total open borders. He says there is no such thing as French culture. There is not one domain that he shows one ounce of patriotism,” she said.
European stock markets surged, and France’s main index hit its highest level since early 2008, as investors gambled that the rise of populism around the world — and the associated potential unpredictability in policy-making — may have peaked.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel wished Macron “all the best for the next two weeks.”
Merkel’s chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, tweeted that “the result for Emmanuel Macron shows: France AND Europe can win together! The center is stronger than the populists think!”
Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, made it to the second round against Jacques Chirac in 2002 but was crushed in the runoff. Many commentators expect the same fate for his daughter, though she has already drawn far more support than he ever did and she has transformed the party’s once-pariah image.
Chirac refused to debate Jean-Marie Le Pen on principle. Macron has already agreed to share a stage with his daughter.
Le Pen offers an alternative for anyone skeptical of the EU and France’s role in it, said Louis Aliot, another National Front vice president.
“I’m not convinced that the French are willing to sign a blank check to Mr. Macron,” he said.
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