World

French president urges voters to back centrist candidate to block rise of far right

French centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron leaves his apartment, in Paris yesterday. French voters shut out the political mainstream from the presidency for the first time in modern history, and yesterday found themselves being courted for the runoff election between populist Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron PICTURE: Thibault Camus/AP
French centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron leaves his apartment, in Paris yesterday. French voters shut out the political mainstream from the presidency for the first time in modern history, and yesterday found themselves being courted for the French centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron leaves his apartment, in Paris yesterday. French voters shut out the political mainstream from the presidency for the first time in modern history, and yesterday found themselves being courted for the runoff election between populist Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron PICTURE: Thibault Camus/AP

FRENCH president Francois Hollande has urged voters to choose centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron in the May 7 presidential run-off to keep out far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

Ms Le Pen later announced that she would be temporarily stepping down as head of the National Front but that she would continue to contest the presidential elections.

The move appears to be an attempt to appeal to a wider range of voters.

"Tonight I am no longer the president of the National Front. I am the presidential candidate," she said.

Earlier, speaking from the Elysee palace, Mr Hollande said Ms Le Pen's platform of pulling out of the euro would devastate the country's economy and threaten French liberty.

He said the far-right would "deeply divide France" at a time when the terror threat requires solidarity and cohesion.

Mr Macron was Mr Hollande's top adviser on economic issues from 2012 to 2014, then economy minister in his Socialist government for two years.

In April 2016 he launched his own political movement, En Marche! (In Motion!) to prepare his presidential bid as an independent centrist candidate. He quit the government a few months later.

Mr Hollande's intervention came as France's defeated political mainstream united to urge voters to back Mr Macron.

Politicians on the moderate left and right, including the Socialist and Republicans party losers in Sunday's first-round vote, sought to block Ms Le Pen's path to power.

The mainstream parties were shut out of the presidency after the first round, which narrowed the presidential field from 11 to two.

This election is widely seen as a litmus test for the populist wave, which last year prompted the UK to vote to leave the European Union and led to Donald Trump being elected US president.

The defeated far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, pointedly refused to back Mr Macron, and Ms Le Pen's National Front is hoping to do the once-unthinkable and gain the support of voters historically opposed to a party long-tainted by racism and anti-Semitism.

National Front vice president Steeve Brios had said before Ms Le Pen's announcement: "The voters who voted for Mr Melenchon are angry voters. They can be in agreement with us."

He said that these voters can express a choice "outside the system".

Choosing from inside the system is no longer an option, as voters rejected the two mainstream parties that have alternated power for decades in favour of Ms Le Pen and the untested Mr Macron, who has never held elected office and who founded his own political movement just last year.

Turnout was 78 per cent, down slightly from 79 per cent in the first round of presidential voting in 2012.

Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon, whose party holds a majority in the legislature, received just 6 per cent of the vote. Socialist president Francois Hollande, the most unpopular in modern French record-keeping, did not seek re-election.

Former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls said: "We are in a phase of decomposition, demolition, deconstruction.

"We didn't do the work – intellectual, ideological and political – on what the left is, and we paid the price."

Francois Fillon, the scandal-plagued conservative Republican candidate, fared marginally better, coming in third with just shy of 20 per cent of the vote.

Both centre-right and centre-left fell in behind Mr Macron, whose optimistic vision of a tolerant France and a united Europe with open borders is a stark contrast to Ms Le Pen's darker, inward-looking "French-first" platform, which calls for closed borders, tougher security, less immigration and dropping the euro to return to the French franc.

Ms Le Pen went on the offensive against Macron in her first public comments yesterday.

She said: "He is a hysterical, radical 'Europeanist'. He is for total open borders. He says there is no such thing as French culture. There is not one domain that he shows one ounce of patriotism."

Mr Macron's party spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, said that Ms Le Pen is hardly a vector of change.

"She's been in the political system for 30 years," he said.

"She inherited her father's party and we will undoubtedly have Le Pens running for the next 20 years, because after we had the father, we have the daughter and we will doubtless have the niece," he said, referring to Marion Marechal-Le Pen.

"So she is in a truly bad position to be talking about the elites and the people."

Mr Macron came in first in Sunday's vote, with just over 23 per cent; Marine Le Pen had 21 per cent; Mr Melenchon and Mr Fillon each had 19 per cent. Mr Fillon, a former prime minister, bested the former Trotskyist Mr Melenchon by just 94,998 votes.

European stock markets surged, and France's main index hit its highest level since early 2008, as investors gambled that the rise of populism around the world – and the associated potential unpredictability in policy-making – may have peaked.

German chancellor Angela Merkel also wished Mr Macron "all the best for the next two weeks".