Macron woos leftist voters as French campaign nears end
SAINT-DENIS, France — French President Emmanuel Macron visited a multicultural, working-class suburb north of Paris on Thursday to woo leftist voters ahead of Sunday’s presidential runoff vote against far-right challenger Marine Le Pen.
Reflecting the vote’s wide international influence, the centrist Macron received support Thursday from the center-left leaders of Germany, Spain and Portugal, who urged French voters to choose him over the nationalist Le Pen. Their appeals came only a day after imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny also spoke up about the French vote, alleging that Le Pen is too closely linked to Russian authorities to become France’s next president amid Russia’s war on Ukraine.
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Macron, who led the first round of voting on April 10 that eliminated 10 other candidates, said he was taking nothing for granted and was seeking broader support.
“Nothing is final until the last minute,” Macron said Thursday, as recent opinion polls show a stabilized lead against his rival.
He said he chose to make one of his last campaign stops in a place that “is facing many difficulties” in the poorest region of mainland France, the Seine-Saint-Denis, where many residents are immigrants or have immigrant roots.
His visit came after the two rivals clashed bitterly in a televised debate Wednesday, with Macron saying that Le Pen’s plan to ban Muslim women in France from wearing headscarves in public would trigger “civil war” in the country, which has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe.
“We must not get used to the rise of far-right ideas,” Macron said Thursday in front of an ethnically diverse crowd in Saint-Denis.
Le Pen, meanwhile, used her last big campaign rally to accuse Macron of “unlimited arrogance” in the debate and in his presidency.
“I’ve had enough, like you, of this permanent disrespect,” she told voters in the northern city of Arras, in the struggling former industrial heartland of France where she enjoys broad support among working-class voters.
She framed Macron as soft on immigration and security and called his economic record — hurt by the pandemic and Ukraine war — “catastrophic.”
