With just six days until a French presidential runoff that could define Europe’s future, far-right leader Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron held high-stakes rallies Monday that overlapped with May Day marches and underscored the fact that jobs are voters’ No. 1 concern, reports The Seymour Tribune.
France votes for a new president on Sunday, a ballot being watched closely by financial markets and France’s neighbors as a test of the global populist wave. While Le Pen got an endorsement from her father on Monday, Macron held an emotional meeting with a Moroccan man whose father died years ago when he was thrown off a Paris bridge by far-right skinheads.
A May Day march attended by thousands of people in Paris was disrupted as scores of hooded youths threw gasoline bombs at riot police in full gear, who responded with tear gas and truncheons. One police officer was seen spraying a troublemaker in the face.
While supporters from fringe movements often disrupt protest marches in the French capital, they usually don’t carry signs. Some of the violent protesters at the May Day event had signs referring to the presidential election and expressing dissatisfaction with both candidates in Sunday’s runoff election.
“Not one or the other; instead it’s the people’s self-defense” read one sign. “Macron=Louis XVI, Le Pen=Le Pen,” read another.
Workers in the union-organized march want to block Le Pen from getting into power, but offered differing methods on Monday. Some urged French workers to vote for Macron. Others refused to support the centrist, including far-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was eliminated in the first-round vote on April 23.
Wanted or not, Le Pen was praised by her 88-year-old father Jean-Marie, the co-founder of her National Front party. She expelled him from the party in 2015 after he reiterated anti-Semitic comments.
In a speech before a gilded Paris statue of his heroine, Joan of Arc, Jean-Marie Le Pen urged French voters to back his daughter in Sunday’s runoff.
“She is not Joan of Arc, but she accepts the same mission … France,” Jean-Marie Le Pen said.
He denounced Macron as a “masked Socialist” backed by the highly unpopular Socialist President François Hollande. Macron once served as Hollande’s economy minister.
Read more of this Associated Press report published by The Seymour Tribune.