PARIS (AP) – After “the battle of Whirlpool,” when Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron both went hunting for France’s blue-collar vote at a threatened home appliance factory, the presidential candidates clashed over fish in a return to more traditional campaigning on Thursday.
The anti-European Union far-right populist Le Pen was up before dawn to cruise aboard a fishing trawler on the Mediterranean. The sea trip was her latest television-friendly effort to portray herself as the candidate of France’s workers against the centrist former banker and finance minister Macron, whom she paints as the candidate of the financial, political and pro-EU elite.
Macron had a scheduled television appearance on Thursday evening.
“My grandfather was a fisherman, so I am in my element,” Le Pen said after her pre-dawn voyage aboard the “Grace of God 2” trawler.
She said France will take back control of its maritime policies if she is elected in the second-round vote on May 7. She again tore into Macron’s more economically liberal program. Macron fired back on Twitter, saying her proposals to take France out of the EU would sink France’s fishing industry.