Marine Le Pen stepping down from Front National in SHOCK move

Emmanuel Macron: “In two weeks, I want to become your president, ghe president of all people of France, the president of patriots against the threat of nationalists”.

The National Front leader had advanced to the second round of France’s presidential election along with centrist Emmanuel Macron.

Le Pen has said for months she is not, strictly speaking, an FN candidate but a candidate backed by the FN.

Opinion polls suggest Mr. Macron is firm favorite for the second round but Ms Le Pen said: “We can win, we will win”. Despite her far-right policies, Le Pen has still gone to great lengths to distance herself and her party from its more extremist roots.

Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.

However, since Sunday Le Pen has been on the offensive. She announced she was standing down as leader of her National Front (NF) party, which has an extreme history, for the rest of the campaign. As the country’s presidential race heats up, its far-right populist candidate has declared that she’s ditching her party altogether to court the whole of France.

The contest was close; Macron and Le Pen secured 23.7% and 21.7 % of the vote while the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and conservative Francois Fillon tied for third place with about 19.5% of the votes each. The 48-year-old Le Pen has denounced what she calls “Islamic fundamentalism”, though she’s spoken out against Muslim identity in general, too. She’s since tried to forge alliances with Jewish communities in France.

Under France’s Fifth Republic, the President is the head of state, very much like a monarch in other countries, a role described by founder Charles De Gaulle as being above party politics – something Ms.

Seconds after the first projections came through, Macron supporters at a Paris conference centre burst into the national anthem, the Marseillaise.

Macron added that he had not arrived to make big promises, but the candidate did warn Whirlpool employees that if Le Pen was elected president, the factory would surely be shut down.

Ms. Le Pen had made immigration one of her major issues, while Mr. Macron, a former banker and former minister in the reigning Socialist government, focused on alleged mismanagement of the economy, promising a smaller government and tax cuts.