French President Emmanuel Macron will take his quest for more votes to the industrial heartlands of northern France on Monday, a blue-collar stronghold of his far-right adversary Marine Le Pen, who he will face in an April 24 presidential runoff poll.
Macron and Le Pen came out on top in Sunday’s first-round voting, setting up a rerun of the 2017 fight pitting a pro-European economic liberal against a euro-sceptic nationalist.
Polls forecast a close-fought second round with one study suggesting Macron will win with just 51 percent of the vote and 49 percent for Le Pen. The margin of error is so small that a victory for either side is possible.
“Let’s make no mistake, nothing has been decided yet,” Macron told his jubilant fans after partial results showed him qualifying for the runoff.
A populist economic programme that would see the retirement age decreased to 60 for people who began working before the ages of 20 and income tax eliminated for those under the age of 30 was a target of his far-right competitor.
About Macron’s own platform, the French president said, “Do you want a France that speaks of full employment and is serious about paying its social state?”
Macron supporters and even his campaign aides have argued he must now focus on attracting the left.
There were 33% of the votes cast for Le Pen in the Hauts-de-France area in northern France. Left-wing candidates earned a combined 27-28 percent of the vote in the area. How the left’s votes are redistributed countrywide will be a major determinant in the second-round vote’s outcome.
Le Pen has methodically detoxified the image of her far-right party and moved it closer to the mainstream at a time France has likewise swung to the right in the wake of Islamist terrorism. Even so, her gentler, less aggressive attitude hides a harsh anti-immigrant platform.
But she has been attentive to cost-of-living concerns, hurting millions that have allowed her to tap into a general resentment against rulers as she has toured towns and villages across France.
“One of separation, injustice and chaos imposed by Emmanuel Macron for the advantage of a few, the other a coming together of French people behind social justice and protection,” she added, adding that voters were deciding between the two.
French 5- and 10-year government bonds saw multi-year highs in interest rates ahead of the first round of voting as the race for the presidency became increasingly competitive.
Until the conclusion of the second round, Morgan Stanley predicted that French and German 10-year bond spreads will remain similar to their present levels.
