USSEAU, France (AP) – French presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron hunted Saturday for votes in rural France where his far-right opponent, Marine Le Pen, is making inroads among country folk who feel left behind.
Back in Paris, Le Pen announced that if she wins the presidency next Sunday, she would name Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, her new campaign ally, as prime minister, aiming to secure the nearly 1.7 million votes that the anti-European Union conservative got when he was eliminated from the race in the first round of balloting.
Since many Dupont-Aignan voters had already been expected to switch to Le Pen for her second-round duel against the centrist Macron, his decision to ally himself with her was unlikely to prove a massive electoral boost for her campaign.
Symbolically, however, the new alliance punctured another hole in hopes – expressed by mainstream politicians on both the left and right – that France will unite against Le Pen’s extremism in round two, as it did when her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, made the presidential runoff in 2002, losing overwhelmingly to Jacques Chirac.
At a news conference with Dupont-Aignan, Marine Le Pen celebrated his backing as the creation of “a great patriotic and republican alliance” and said they will campaign “hand-in-hand” for what now becomes their shared program.