Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, has accused his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen, of being indebted to Vladimir Putin and risking a civil war in France with plans to curb Islamism.
But in a televised debate four days before the final vote in the presidential election, Macron failed to deliver the same kind of murderous blows that sealed Le Pen’s defeat in 2017.
Le Pen, who has the best chance to become France’s first woman president and her first far-right head of state since World War II, has outlined plans to drastically reduce “mass, anarchic” immigration, reform the EU and imposition of laws and order.
She accused Liberal Macron of having “very poor economic performance” and “even worse social status” as president.
During almost three hours of sometimes irritating confrontation on pre-selected topics, Macron repeatedly interrupted Le Pen, questioning her facts before sitting back, looking skeptically with folded arms.
At one point, Lea Salame, one of the two moderating journalists who ensure that they have the same amount of time, said to the president, “Emmanuel Macron, let her talk!”
As expected, Macron is ruthlessly exploiting one of Le Pen’s weaknesses: her previous ties to Putin and her party’s loan from a Russian bank in 2014, which is still being repaid. “You depend on Russian power and you depend on Putin,” he said. When she talked about Russia, he added, she “talked to her bankers.”
Le Pen was on the defensive and agreed to help Ukraine in its war against Russian invasion, but she backed her rejection of sanctions against Russian oil and gas, on which much of Western Europe depends. “We cannot make a fuss in the hope of inflicting financial damage on Russia, which will no doubt sell its oil and gas to other countries anyway,” she said.
Macron, who is seeking to win over voters who backed the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon in the first round of elections on April 10, also sharply criticized Le Pen’s plan to ban Muslim women from wearing headscarves in public, saying it would be dangerous as well as unconstitutional.
“You will provoke a civil war if you do that,” he said, prompting Le Pen to charge him with a “very serious” charge.
Five years ago, Le Pen’s performance in the debate was considered a disaster even by her own campaign team, after she ran into business and economic policy issues when she was challenged by Macron.
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Her performance was safer on Wednesday night, but she still seemed awkward at times. Macron, a former finance minister and Rothschild banker, clearly had an advantage when discussing topics such as unemployment, investment and start-ups.
Through the campaign around France, Le Pen successfully focused on rising living costs rather than traditional far-right concerns about immigration and crime. It also attacks one of Macron’s most unpopular manifesto promises, gradually raising the retirement age from 62 to 65 to lower the cost of the country’s pension system.
“Retiring 65 is an absolutely unacceptable injustice,” she said during the debate.
Opinion polls suggest Macron will have a hard time winning Sunday’s run-off vote, although the latest polls show a slight increase in his lead. A Harris Interactive poll released on Wednesday gave him 54 percent of the vote, an eight-point lead over 46 percent of Le Pen.
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