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Tag: Marine Le Pen

  • Reactions trail french Far Right win after snap election

    Reactions trail french Far Right win after snap election

    Marine Le Pen and her far-right National Rally (RN) have won big in France’s snap election, garnering reactions from domestic rival parties and politicians abroad.

    The RN won close to 34 percent of the vote in the first round of the parliamentary election in what was a major victory – but not one that gives the party an absolute majority in the parliament.

    Despite his defeat, Macron welcomed the high turnout of 65.8 percent, and reiterated his call to stand up to the far right in the second round.

    “Faced with National Rally, the time has come for a great union, clearly democratic and republican for the second round,” the president stressed in an official statement.

    Read Also: High turnout in French high-stakes elections

    Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the centre left, said the president suffered a “hard and indisputable defeat” and was to blame for the shock decision to dissolve parliament, but stopping the far right was the priority.

    “Not one more vote for the RN, not one more seat for the RN,” he emphasised.

    In her first comments following the French first-round results, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni yesterday said the “constant attempt to demonise” far-right voters was losing impact.

    “The constant attempt to demonise and corner people who don’t vote for the left… is a trick that fewer and fewer people fall for,” Meloni told the Adnkronos news agency.  

  • French defence minister Goulard steps down amid jobs probe

    French defence minister Goulard steps down amid jobs probe

    French Defence Minister Sylvie Goulard is stepping down amid an investigation into employment contracts at the political party she belongs to, French newspaper Le Monde and other media reported on Tuesday.

    Le Monde quoted a statement from Goulard saying that she wished “to be able to freely demonstrate my good faith” if anti-corruption police wanted to verify the employment conditions of the staff she employed as a member of the European Parliament (MEP).

    Earlier in June, French prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation into allegations that Democratic Movement (Modem) staff had been paid as European Parliament assistants to the party’s MEPs while actually working for the party.

    The investigation was triggered by complaints from a former Modem staffer and an MEP for the far-right National Front, as well as press reports.

    Modem has said that all its staff were properly and legally employed, and that some of them were in fact working part-time for the party and part-time for its MEPs.

    Goulard was an MEP for Modem until she stepped down in May to take up the position of defence minister under President Emmanuel Macron.

    The government resigned on Monday to allow Macron and Prime Minister Edouard Philippe to appoint a new line-up after parliamentary elections, and Le Monde quoted Goulard as saying she had asked not to be reappointed.

    National Front leader Marine Le Pen has also been the subject of allegations that she claimed back salaries from the European Parliament for supposed aides who were actually working for her party.

    Le Pen denies the allegations.

  • New French leader Macron woos conservatives

    New French leader Macron woos conservatives

    Centrist French President-elect Emmanuel Macron on Friday sought to woo conservative members of parliament to his cause and head off a row with an ally as he bids for victory in June parliament elections.

    Macron, until 2016 was the economy minister in the outgoing Socialist administration, blew apart the traditional political boundaries of French politics on May 7.

    He won the presidency under the banner of his own one-year-oldc party.

    His main task now is to try to secure enough seats for REM in the June parliamentary election to give him a majority to push through a set of business-friendly economic reforms.

    On Thursday, he named 428 people around half of whom had never held elected office before to stand for REM in France’s 577 constituencies.

    Among the names were also 24 defecting MPs from the outgoing Socialists and on Friday the party reached out to moderate conservatives to join the cause.

    “There is a group among the Republicans (France’s conservatives) saying ‘we want to be useful to the country, but we do not want to ‘Macronise’ ourselves’.

    “We, being responsible people, are open to discussions.

    “I am not closing any doors,”Macron’s head of candidate selection Arnaud Leroy said, naming a number of leading figures among The Republicans” he said.

    Macron has already made room in the parliament he wants to see for former Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

    His team promised on Thursday not to put up a candidate against a man who represents a wing of the party whose political views are close to Macron’s.

    REM has made clear the way is open for more deals of this kind with other leading Socialists from the party’s right wing and with left-leaning lawmakers among the Republicans.

    In seats held by people who are potential allies it is holding back from putting forward an REM candidate, for the time being.

    Macron, an ex-banker who was elected on May 7 with 65 per cent of a run-off vote to beat the far right’s Marine Le Pen, will take power this Sunday from Socialist President Francois Hollande at a ceremony at the Elysee Palace.

    However, Thursday’s publication of Macron’s partial candidate list produced the first sign of tension within his camp since he was elected.

    Francois Bayrou, a centrist who gave up his presidential bid to join Macron, said that the list contained only 35 names from his Modem party, whereas he and Macron had agreed it should have 120.

    “We got him elected, this (candidate list) is a Socialist recycling operation,” Bayrou said.

    Richard Ferrand, Secretary General of Macron’s REM party, responded to Bayrou’s complaint.

    “There was no set agreement, but there was still room for maneuver given there are more constituencies to be assigned,” Ferrand said.

     

     

  • Macron elected French president

    Centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron, has decisively won the French presidential election, defeating far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen.

    Mr. Macron won by 66.06 per cent to 33.94 per cent to become, at 39, the country’s youngest president, the BBC reports.

    Mr. Macron’s win ends the decades-long dominance of the two traditional main left-wing and right-wing parties.

    He said that a new page was being turned in French history.

    “I want it to be a page of hope and renewed trust,” he said.

    Mr. Macron said he had heard “the rage, anxiety and doubt that a lot of you have expressed” and vowed to spend his five years in office “fighting the forces of division that undermine France.”

    He said he would “guarantee the unity of the nation and defend and protect Europe.”

    Mr. Macron’s supporters gathered in their thousands to celebrate outside the Louvre museum in central Paris and their new president later joined them.

    In his speech to the crowd, he said: “Tonight you won, France won. Everyone told us it was impossible, but they don’t know France.”

    But he repeated a number of times that the task facing him and the country was enormous.

    He said: “We have the strength, the energy and the will – and we will not give in to fear.”

  • French presidential candidate accused of speech plagiarism

    French presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, has been accused of plagiarising defeated rival François Fillon in a speech she delivered on Monday.

    Several sections of her speech in Villepinte, north of Paris, appeared to repeat almost word-for-word comments Mr. Fillon made in an address on April 15, the BBC reports.

    An official of her National Front party said she had made a “nod” to Mr. Fillon and it showed she was “not sectarian.”

    Ms Le Pen faces centrist Emmanuel Macron in the final round on Sunday.

    The similarity in the speeches was pointed out by the Ridicule TV YouTube channel, initially set up by François Fillon’s supporters to attack Mr. Macron before the first round of voting that saw Mr. Fillon eliminated from the contest.

    Ridicule TV said the far right presidential candidate had plagiarised Mr. Fillon’s speech “word for word” and set the two speeches side by side, inviting viewers to make up their own minds.

    The videos were also posted on Twitter.

    Several passages were markedly similar to Mr. Fillon’s speech last month in Puy-en-Velay.

  • Le Pen, Macron spar as French presidential race narrows slightly

    Le Pen, Macron spar as French presidential race narrows slightly

    French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen took a fishing-boat ride on Thursday as two polls suggested the underdog had made a more impressive start to the last lap of campaigning than the favourite, centrist Emmanuel Macron.

    Since on Sunday’s opening ballot sent them into a two-way runoff on May 7.

    The battle has intensified, notably on the public relations front, between two candidates who both said their adversary will ruin the country.

    A daily Opinion poll showed Macron still clear favourite.

    However, his predicted score, which has almost always been 60 per cent or higher over the past few months, dipped to 59 per cent for the first time since mid-March.

    A separate Elabe poll also signaled a potential danger for the favourite.

    it said one out of two people surveyed considered Le Pen’s last-leg campaign had begun well, while for Macron that positive view of latest developments was a slimmer 43 per cent.

    The progression of Macron and Le Pen to the second round on April 23 sent the euro sharply higher and lifted French stocks.

    Investors fear Le Pen’s anti-EU policies could lead to a break-up of the bloc and its single currency.

    However, they are following polls which have shown that of all her main opponents, Macron has the largest predicted winning margin over her.

    Macron, a centrist ex-banker, took to Twitter to deride the National Front leader, whose fishing boat outing in jeans and a white jacket won her extensive TV coverage for a second straight day.

    Flanked by fans and fishermen in the Port de Grau port west of Marseille, Le Pen said that she would defend all seafarers and all endangered sectors against invasive European Union regulations.

    Hitting out at Macron, she said: “Let me warn you, that man will destroy our entire social and economic structure.”

    The independent centrist, a 39-year-old who did a stint as a minister in the outgoing Socialist government before breaking away to launch a cross-partisan political movement, mocked his 48-year-old foe in turn on the Twitter.

    “Madame Le Pen is gone fishing.

    “Enjoy the outing.

    “The exit from Europe that she is proposing will spell the end of French fisheries,” he said.

    The skirmishing has intensified with the countdown to May 7.