France’s far-right reaches across spectrum as runoff looms

The May 7 runoff will be between the populist Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, and French politicians on the moderate left and right immediately urged voters to block Le Pen’s path to power.

France’s presidential election is widely seen as a litmus test for the populist wave that previous year prompted Britain to vote to leave the European Union and USA voters to elect Donald Trump president.

And she can also point to Macron’s background as an investment banker and a graduate of one of France’s elite universities.

In 2016 he set up on his own political movement En Marche!

Nigel Farage has launched an extraordinary attack on Marine Le Pen’s French presidential election rival Emmanuel Macron.

Farage interviewed Le Pen last month, leading some to speculate that he was an admirer of the French far-right figurehead. “They can be in agreement with us”, said Steeve Brios, a vice president of Le Pen’s National Front party. She represents a threat to the strength and unity of the political institutions that have underpinned Western countries for the past half century, notably in her opposition to the European Union and pledge to leave North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

“From today I want to build a majority for a government and for a new transformation”.

President Trump said this week that he believed Le Pen was “the strongest on what’s been going on in France”, while former President Barack Obama called to wish Macron well in the poll.

Investors had feared for the single currency’s future if one of the far-left candidates had gotten through to fight Le Pen. First projected results are expected shortly afterwards.

While Macron offers a vision of gradual economic deregulation that would cause few ripples on global financial markets, Le Pen proposes a more disruptive programme of higher social spending, financed by money-printing, coupled with a withdrawal from the euro and possibly the EU.

Pollsters projected that conservative former Prime Minister Francois Fillon was trailing the two leading candidates and that Socialist Benoit Hamon was far behind.

A snap Ipsos survey late on Sunday suggested that Macron, who’s aiming to be the country’s youngest head of state, would win by 62 percent to 38 percent for Le Pen, who would be the country’s first female president.

He said: “Good, that Emmanuel Macron was successful with his strong direction for a strong European Union and social market economy”.

The dollar was up 0.8 percent at 110.03 yen JPY=, rising above the 110-yen level for the first time in almost two weeks and logging an earlier high of 110.64.

It was a bitter night for Fillon, seen as a shoo-in for the Elysee until he was hit in January by allegations that his wife had been paid from the public purse for work she did not do.

Who is Marine Le Pen?

Le Pen has gone so far as to chide Trump for what she sees as a reversal on North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, a body that he criticized during his campaign but has now embraced. “But buying the yen seems to be the established market reaction, and if you’ve been around long enough, you know you don’t go against the market”, he said.