Rabat - Despite being heavily favoured by most analysts to win the May 7 election, the centrist outsider Emmanuel Macron has found himself upstaged by opponent, Marine Le Pen, on Wednesday.
Rabat – Despite being heavily favoured by most analysts to win the May 7 election, the centrist outsider Emmanuel Macron has found himself upstaged by opponent, Marine Le Pen, on Wednesday.
Appearing before Whirlpool workers striking at a factory in his hometown of Amiens, Macron arrived to learn that Le Pen had out-maneuvered him by showing up hours earlier, posing for pictures and promising to keep the factory from closing. Le Pen announced she would go as far as bringing the factory under the control of the state if that’s what it took to keep it running.
Instead of the warm welcome Le Pen had received, Macron’s was decidedly colder. Despite Macron’s good performance against the blatant heckling that greeted him, French television reveled in footage of of the candidate dodging barbs with workers, in contrast to the image of Le Pen happily posing for photographs.
In an interview with France Inter radio, Le Pen’s top advisor Florian Philippot described the Front National party’s take on the worker perspective. “Mr. Macron offers no hope. In this case, people cannot stand by and do nothing, they have to stand up and fight.”
Recent polls suggest that Macron is on track to win approximately 60 percent of the vote in the upcoming election, but critics are warning him against complacency. He was criticized on Sunday night following an appearance at a posh Parisian restaurant for a post round-one election celebration. Le Pen’s camp wasted no time to labeling the visit as elitist and out of touch with regular French voters.
As a result of these public relations blunders, an Elabe poll conducted for BFM TV revealed that only 43 percent of the people surveyed thought that the final leg of Macron’s had gotten off to a good start. By contrast, half believed that Le Pen’s campaign took off well.
