If the far-right’s Marine Le Pen wins on Sunday, she aims to leave NATO and ban the hijab. But voters feel Emmanuel Macron has become President for the rich. Europe correspondent Rob Harris reports. frenchelections
, just six months before he pulled off a stunning 2017 presidential election victory, he wrote that if the French people did not wake up to themselves then the far-right would soon be in power.
“It’s the choice between a democratic candidate who believes that France is stronger in a powerful and autonomous EU, and an extreme-right candidate who openly lines up with those who are attacking our liberty and our democracy.” But Macron, 44, has found it harder and harder in recent weeks to pin down Le Pen, who in the past five years has reshaped and softened her image and gone about courting new voters from across the political spectrum.
She wants to encourage firms to increase wages by making the rises free of employers’ contributions and exempt everyone under 30 from paying income tax. And Le Pen, he says, “has a traditional extreme left, sovereigntist, protectionist, nationalist agenda” while the substance of her manifesto is also traditionally right-wing, including strong anti-European rhetoric and promise to make it a fineable offence for women to wear headscarves in public.
They say that, although they know more people who are voting for Le Pen this time, there is still some stigma. Most of their families won’t vote at all on Sunday, they said, because they “can’t stand either candidate”. Le Pen went on the attack during her final rally of the campaign, dubbing Macron and her media critics a “cohort of sad sires”, “merchants of fear” and “peddlers of slander”.
The first signs of a shift against Macron came in November 2018, with a series of grassroots, populist rallies in small towns and rural France.took its name from the high-visibility jackets protesters adopted as a symbol of their complaint. They sprang up spontaneously gainst hikes in car fuel taxes, with supporters donning the fluorescent safety vests that French law requires all motorists to carry.
Le Pen has tried to maintain her grip on many rural and deindustrialised areas in the past week, while Macron has focussed on more-prosperous urban areas, talking about climate change and the future of Europe as a bloody war plays out just a few hours away.
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