Under pressure from a shrinking lead in the polls, French President Emmanuel Macron stepped up his attacks on far-right Marine Le Pen, his main rival for the first round of Sunday’s election in France.
“Marine Le Pen lies to people,” Macron said during an interview with the newspaper Le Parisian at a time when his rival is getting closer in the polls and even threatens the victory of the great favorite for long months.
The latest series of polls published before the day of reflection on Saturday, in which France will enter in silence, without a campaign, confirms the upward trend of the candidate of the National Association (RN), which has generated fear in some social sectors.
Macron leads the first round with between 26% and 27% of voting intentions, followed by Le Pen (from 22% to 25%) and the leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon (from 16.5% to 18%). The president’s advantage over the far-right is reduced to between 2 and 8 points according to the polls.
On the last day of the campaign, the current president tried to undermine the image of moderate and close to the problems of the people that Le Pen has carved for himself during the campaign: “His program is racist,” he said, “it is a program to leave Europe, although she no longer says so clearly.
“An electoral competition is a confrontation of ideas, it is not a fight,” Macron, the heiress of the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father, responded to an “aggressive” and “feverish” during a visit to a market in Narbonne. , south of France.
France seems to repeat the Macron-Le Pen duel of 2017, but the end seems more uncertain in a country that for the last five years has experienced social protests, a pandemic and now the economic effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Faced with this duel, the rest of the candidates are already beginning to position themselves even before the first round. The socialist Anne Hidalgo, the communist Fabien Roussel and the environmentalist Yannick Jadot announced that they will try to prevent the victory of the extreme right in the second round at all costs.
