French elections: Left, center and right pledge union to Macron to stop Le Pen | Globalism

The goal is to prevent Le Pen’s party from coming to power. This is called France The “Republican Front”, a kind of national alliance against the radical right.

Macron led the first round with about 28% of the vote, according to expectations, a better performance than expected in recent polls, as the incumbent president has been gradually slipping away.

Le Pen would have received about 23% of the vote.

Sunday’s election was marked by a strong abstention, from 25% to 26% of the electorate, according to expectations. However, both scored better than in the first round of the 2017 presidential election, when they won 24% and 21.3% of the vote, respectively.

Ten other candidates competed in the election – and Macron has not been spared criticism during his election campaigns.

Socialist Anne Hidalgo, the current mayor of Paris, was the first to take a stand in favor of the incumbent and urged her voters to vote “against the far right” after opinion polls came out and the second round was confirmed.

Ecologist Yannick Gadot made a similar statement. Communist Fabien Roussel said he would “never allow Le Pen to take power” and appealed to “all French people to use the only ballot paper available to defeat her in the second round”.

And Valerie Pecresse, the candidate of the right-wing Republicans party (for former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy), who during her campaign was highly critical of the current president’s administration, also announced that she would vote for Macron.

“Despite the deep disagreements with Macron, which I have had throughout my campaign, I will vote for him in good conscience to prevent his coming to power. Marine Le PenShe added that Le Pen’s eventual victory “would lead to France of the controversy and to a background on the European and international stage.”

Pecres also highlighted Le Pen’s “historic ties” with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, which she said would prevent her France to defend its interests.

Third place in the vote, Jean-Luc Melenchon, from France The unshakable radical left – which has gained about 20%, according to opinion polls – did not appeal directly to its constituents to vote for Macron, but at the same time said that they “should not give a single vote to” Marine Le Pen.

Philippe Bhutto of the New Anti-Capitalist Party also styled himself as Mélenchon, stressing the need to give Le Pen a “no vote”.

In his speech after the release of the first-round forecast, in a place where hundreds of supporters gathered, Macron defended the idea of ​​a “great movement for unity and action”, which would bring together “different sensations”. (Policy).

Until recently, polls indicated that Macron would win the election by a good margin over his far-right rival. But his favouritism began to lose steam in mid-March.with expectations indicating a much smaller advantage for Macron over Le Pen in the second round, of only three or four percentage points, within the margin of error, unprecedented for a party of the radical right in the presidential election in France.

In 2017, Macron beat Le Pen by 32 points.

And a poll conducted by the Ifop institute, Sunday evening, after the results of the first round were announced, reinforces the idea that the dispute is still very fierce: Macron will win in the second round, scheduled for April 24, with 51% of the vote. The vote, just two percentage points more than Le Pen, is within the margin of error.

“Even if Macron remains the favourite, he will not be a representative of the former National Front (Le Pen’s party, which changed its name to the National Rally) – be it Marine Le Penin 2017, or his father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2002 (who reached the second round in a record abstaining vote) – benefited from such a positive composition in a second round”, writes Le Monde.

Marine Le Pen He managed to improve his score in the first round despite challenging extremist Eric Zemmour whose controversial statements have already earned him convictions in court for inciting racial and religious hatred.

Zemmour won 7% of the vote, according to expectations, and announced his support for Le Pen in the second round.

An Ifop poll published on Sunday also indicates that 44% of Melenchon voters could abstain in the second round. Of those who will vote, a third will choose Macron and 23% will choose Le Pen.

Le Pen’s economic program is similar to that of Mélenchon of the radical left. In this campaign, the National Rally candidate left aside the issues of immigration, Islam and security, and her party’s historical projects, which are still extremist, and focused in her speeches on economic issues, especially measures related to purchasing power, the larger topic. Benefit. of the French today.

The far right achieved an unprecedented performance in the first round. By adding Le Pen’s votes, the radical Eric Zemmour, of Reconquista, who won 7%, and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who would have received less than 2%, according to estimates, the radical right won nearly a third of the vote.

The two traditional parties of the Right (Republicans) and the Left (Socialists, PS) that ruled France In recent decades, they have done poorly, never before, and are in danger of disappearing from the French political scene.

Above all PS: Candidate Anne Hidalgo received only 1.7% of the vote, according to expectations. In 2017, the Socialist Party actually received only 6.3% of the vote.

Had there not been a number of left-wing candidates, Mélenchon, who has made calls for a “helpful vote” in the field, would have qualified for the second round.

Valerie Pecres, of the Republican Party, garnered less than 5% of the vote, about 4.7%. In 2017, the right-wing Republican candidate came third in the first round with 20% of the vote.

“The utter failure of the Socialist Party and the Republicans leads them to marginalization. A new political landscape is emerging. There is a new distribution of political forces in France‘,” says political analyst Brice Tintorrier, director general of the Ipsos Institute.

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