© Provided by Agencia EFE
Paris, Apr 17 (EFE).- In the final stretch of their campaign as candidates for president of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen will face each other next Sunday in a tight battle where the left will play an essential role and is already preparing its role in building a strong opposition in Parliament.
Three days before the television debate that will be decisive for the mobilization at the polls, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical left party, La Francia Insumisa, which was disqualified despite finishing third in the first round, revealed the result of a consultation on the vote to his supporters.
In it, two-thirds of Mélenchon’s supporters (out of a total of 215,000 participants) indicated that they do not intend to vote in the second round or that they will vote blank or null. Just over 33% are willing to vote for Macron.
The 7.7 million Mélenchon voters are the potential audience to which Macron and Le Pen direct most of their speeches these days, since a low mobilization might go in favor of the far-right candidate.
The latest polls give a tight victory to Liberate Macron with 55.5% of the vote (margin of error of 3.3 points), with his rival much closer to him than in the 2017 elections (66.1% compared to 33.9% for Le Pen).
Mélenchon’s left has inflated its chest with the 21.95% it obtained on April 10, far removed from the meager data of the socialists (1.75%), communists (2.3%) or environmentalists (4.6 %), and is organized to translate all their votes into deputies in the legislative elections in June.
The leader of the Socialists, Olivier Faure, said this Saturday in an interview with “Libération” that they have their hand out for an agreement with La Francia Insumisa, but the proposal has been received with a slam.
This Sunday, the president of the group of deputies Mathilde Panot, indicated in “Le Journal du Dimanche” that the agreement that they have proposed to environmentalists and communists to -possibly- present common candidates in the legislative elections, does not extend to the socialists.
CONVINCE AND CONVINCE
Mélenchon’s party, which at 70 years of age contemplates retiring from the first political line unless Le Pen wins, takes advantage of the “hope” that he says he feels following having been regarding to qualify for the second round by regrouping the vote of the left.
The proposals that the outgoing president, Emmanuel Macron, launched this Saturday in Marseille, Mélenchon’s fiefdom, in favor of ecology seem to have fallen on deaf ears, at least between the parties.
“There are no reasons to believe in Macron’s environmental proposals. He has had five years to act and has not done so,” the national secretary of the Ecologists, Julien Bayou, told France Info on Sunday.
In the absence of a slogan in Mélenchon’s party, whose only call has been not to vote for Le Pen, the unions and other sectors of the left have joined the mobilizations to warn of the danger that Le Pen represents. The polls calculate that a third of the voters of the leftist might go to the extreme right.
In parallel, Le Pen’s party, which has described Macron’s ads for ecological transformation as a “scam”, had to defend itself this Sunday from Mediapart’s revelation of the result of the investigation at the European Anti-Fraud Office for a case of diversion of public funds between 2004 and 2017.
The Office would have delivered the result of its report to the Paris Prosecutor’s Office in March, where they point out that the party would have diverted up to 600,000 euros.
The formation, which wants to transform the European Union into a “society of nations”, says that it is a “smoke bomb” in these elections, and an interference by Brussels in French affairs.
Le Pen must focus her efforts in the coming days on Wednesday’s debate, following the 2017 experience in which she exposed her inconsistencies and gaps to an audience of 16.5 million viewers. That was “the biggest failure” of his career, as he confessed this Friday in an interview with a “youtuber”.
For his part, and aware of the risk of not mobilizing the electorate enough to make a republican opposition to Le Pen, Macron’s strategy in the debate will be “convincing, convincing and convincing”, as Christophe Castaner, the president of the group of macronista deputies.
“He is not going to beat Le Pen but to speak to the French,” he added.
Maria D. Valderrama
(c) EFE Agency
