Macron impresses viewers as Le Pen loses TV debate
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FRENCH centrist Emmanuel Macron impressed more viewers than his far-right rival Marine Le Pen in a fiery TV debate, a poll found yesterday, underlining his status as favorite for this weekend’s presidential runoff.
The candidates clashed repeatedly over terrorism, the economy and Europe in a hot-tempered debate watched by 16.5 million people on Wednesday.
A poll by French broadcaster BFMTV found 63 percent of viewers thought Macron the “most convincing,” broadly mirroring the forecast for the election on Sunday.
The duel was billed as a confrontation between Macron’s call for openness and pro-market reforms and Le Pen’s France-first nationalism.
Le Pen branded the former economy minister and investment banker “the candidate of the elite” and the “darling of the system.”
Macron responded by describing the 48-year-old scion of the National Front as “the heir of a system which has prospered from the fury of the French people for decades”.
‘Parasite of system’
“The high priestess of fear is sitting before me,” he said.
He frequently branded Le Pen a liar and even a “parasite of the system,” who he said lived off the frustrations of France’s stalled political system.
On Europe, Le Pen accused Macron of being “submissive” toward German Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying: “France will be led by a woman, either me or Mrs Merkel.”
She also accused Macron of an “indulgent attitude” toward Islamic fundamentalism and constantly sought to remind viewers of his role as a minister in unpopular President Francois Hollande’s Socialist government.
But Macron was in combative form, repeatedly portraying Le Pen’s stance as simplistic, defeatist or dangerous and targeting her proposals to withdraw France from the euro in particular. The euro policy “was the big nonsense of Marine Le Pen’s program,” he said.
Le Pen called the euro “the currency of bankers, it’s not the people’s currency.”
Le Monde said the debate had been “brutal” and “violent from start to finish.”
Former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls said Le Pen “showed her true face” in the debate and “it’s worrying.”
The debate was probably Le Pen’s last chance to change the dynamics of the race ahead of the final weekend.
But the poll by Elabe for BFMTV showing that Macron had convinced 63 percent of viewers compared to 34 percent for Le Pen suggests she did little to win new support.
Macron would win around 40 to 60 percent if the vote were held now, surveys suggest.
Yesterday, he was holding a campaign event in the southwest town of Albi while Le Pen was heading to Ennemain in the north.
The TV duel marked a new step into the mainstream for Le Pen, whose party was once considered by France’s political establishment to be an extremist fringe that should be boycotted.
When her father Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the final round of the presidential election in 2002, his conservative opponent Jacques Chirac refused to debate with him out of fear of “normalizing hate and intolerance.”
In the first round of the election on April 23, Marine Le Pen finished second scoring 21.3 percent after softening the FN’s image over the past six years — but without fully removing doubt about the party’s core beliefs.
She sees her rise as the consequence of growing right-wing nationalism and a backlash against globalization seen in the election of Donald Trump in the United States and Britain’s shock vote to leave the European Union.
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