THE PEN. The debate between two rounds takes place on April 20, Marine Le Pen is counting on the exercise to break the dynamic of Emmanuel Macron. A few days before the second round, the RN candidate is given behind the outgoing president in the second round of the presidential election in all the polls.
The essential
- The debate between the two rounds, tonight at 9 p.m., is a crucial issue for Marine Le Pen. The candidate has gathered her close collaborators to take advantage of the last hours in her Paris office, and has not planned any campaign trips in recent days to prepare for this confrontation.
- The National Rally candidate is credited with 43 to 47% of voting intentions in the second round of the presidential election according to the various polls.
- With a program firmly rooted in the extreme right, Marine Le Pen tries to qualify her remarks and her positions, in particular on the ban on wearing the veil, a few days before the election.
- A week before the second round of the presidential election, Marine Le Pen is accused, along with four deputies from her party, of embezzlement in a report by the European Union Anti-Fraud Office. The candidate is accused of having wrongly received 137,000 euros.
- Follow the latest news from Marine Le Pen in this campaign between the two rounds of this 2022 presidential election.
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11:20 – The separatists of New Caledonia call for abstention in the second round
Ne “ni-nor” of voters who cannot bring themselves to vote for Emmanuel Macron to block Marine Le Pen has gone around the world. This April 20, it is the turn of the separatists of New Caledonia to ask their activists and sympathizers to “abstain” this April 24. If they say they do not prefer the far right to the outgoing president, they cannot support him either, accusing him of having maintained the referendum on independence in December 2021. In a short text signed by the Liberation Front National Kanak Socialist (FLNKS), historic movement of the Kanak struggle, and also signed by the Union of Trade Unions of Kanak and Exploited Workers (USTKE), and its political branch, the Labor Party, and the Unitary Dynamik South (DUS ), the instruction to abstain has been communicated. “The order of the dam against the extreme right does not suffer from any hesitation. Nevertheless, voting Emmanuel Macron means approving the phony referendum consultation of December 12 that the outgoing president stubbornly organized in defiance of the Kanak people,” further argued the DUS, member of the support committee for Jean-Luc Mélenchon. , in a press release. Marine Le Pen will therefore certainly not be able to count on New Caledonia, whose voters had in any case voted above all for Emmanuel Macron in the first round (40.51%), granting only 18.83% to the candidate of the RN. There, the winner of the first round was unquestionably the record abstention (66.65%).
10:40 – Jordan Bardella talks about the apprehension on the RN side before the between-two-rounds debate
The two finalists are about to repeat the exercise of the debate between the two rounds five years after that of 2017, about which Marine Le Pen has often said that she regrets her performance. On the set of France 2 this April 20 in the morning, and as the debate began the same evening, the acting president of the RN, Jordan Bardella, conceded “apprehension” before the debate between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron , explaining: “There is no stress but there is a form of apprehension, because we know that many French people will decide on this debate and that it will not be the same debate as there. is five years old (…) Perhaps the mistake we made in 2017 was to want to show the French people the brutality of Emmanuel Macron’s project. Tonight, I assure you, she will talk a lot about herself and the vision she has for the country, not for the next five years but for the next fifty years, “he said. Journalists asked him if the debate would be less aggressive than in 2017, when the peaks had rocketed between the two candidates. “The idea is to have a serene and peaceful debate”, he replied. “Me, I deplore that since the beginning of this campaign we have been the target of anathemas, caricatures (…) Me, I want to say to the French people perhaps one thing before this evening: “Do not listen to the merchants of fear , do not rely on caricatures. Listen to what Marine Le Pen is going to tell you this evening and choose in your soul and conscience”, he concluded, thus showing himself rather confident in the ability of the leader of the extreme- right to make the polls lie, which for the moment give it behind the outgoing president.
10:20 – What is this very right-wing column published in Le Figaro?
In a column published this April 20 in the morning by Le Figaro, Marion Maréchal, Guillaume Peltier and Nicolas Bay, three of the vice-presidents of Reconquest! call for a rally on the right to win the legislative elections. “It will be necessary to be able to build a presidential majority around Marine Le Pen or to impose cohabitation on Emmanuel Macron in order to prevent him from having full legislative powers for the next five years. It would be illusory to think that this majority can be achieved without alliances. No party can hope to obtain it alone and the others have understood it, ”they noted at the start of the forum. “This is why Eric Zemmour and his team are calling for a grand coalition of right-wingers and patriots for these legislative elections which would bring together Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest! party, the National Rally, all the LR candidates or various right-wingers who do not want become the auxiliary deputies of the majority of Emmanuel Macron as well as Debout la France”. By initiating a large, very right-wing union, Eric Zemmour’s right-hand men hope “to start discussions with the LRs and various right-wing parties concerned, the leaders of the RN and DLF to discuss together the modalities and contours that this coalition platform could take “.
10:00 – Marion Maréchal believes that Marine Le Pen could win
“Marine Le Pen can still win” launched at the microphone of BFMTV Marion Maréchal, the vice-president of Reconquest! whose candidate, Eric Zemmour, called for a vote for Marine Le Pen in the second round. Assuring that she “hoped” that this victory would materialize, she said she was confident: “This is the reason why I personally called to vote for her, including Eric Zemmour”. between rounds, she was also optimistic about her aunt’s ability to stand up to the outgoing president: “I don’t think she’s coming in the same conditions, with the same experience. I think she still learned from her mistakes, undeniably. I do not expect at all that there will be a spectacular gap tonight. I think that on the contrary, she will be able to regain control and probably be better prepared than last time and also less tired than she was at the end of the campaign”. If she therefore supports Marine Le Pen, she is nonetheless Eric Zemmour’s right arm, and says she does not “regret anything” about her choices in recent months.
09:45 – Marion Maréchal aims for union on the right for the legislative elections
“We have the historic possibility of being able to win if we are together”. These are the words of the support of Eric Zemmour and the new vice-president of Reconquête!, Marion Maréchal, who said that She held them at the microphone of BFMTV, a few hours after the publication of her op-ed in Le Figaro, in which she positioned herself in favor of a grand coalition between Les Républicains, Reconquête! of Debout la France (DLF), the party of Nicolas Dupont-Aignan. Given her role as the initiator of this initiative, but also as a pillar of the extreme right in France, she wanted to warn: “I have no not say that the objective of this coalition was to be the leader. The objective is to be at the initiative. ” She said she was convinced that a victory for this “great nationalist movement” is possible “We must raise awareness at the same time at the RN, at DLF but also at these elected LR who do not ulent steps of the agreements with Emmanuel Macron that today we have the perhaps historic possibility of being able to win, if we are together, a majority, at least relative if not absolute”, she continued, basing its confidence and its ambition on the “projections” made at the end of the first round of the presidential election. “We can hope under these conditions that there are about 379 second rounds with candidates who are common candidates (…). I believe that this is an opportunity that we cannot pass up, whatever the result on Sunday”, she estimated, before adding that this call would also be relevant in the event of victory of Emmanuel Macron this April 24, to “impose cohabitation” on him.
09:15 – Delphine Wespiser returns to her remarks vis-à-vis Marine Le Pen
Delphine Wespiser, the ex-miss France 2012, had shown her support (at least her sympathy) for the candidate of the RN by declaring “You see that when you look at her, when you listen to her, she really offers something. She has a form of benevolence” on the set of Cyril Hanouna’s show, in his show Touche pas à mon poste on April 13. Because of this statement, she assured, six days later, to have “received thousands of insults and threats” during the weekend. She finally returned to this position during her debate with Mourad Boudjellal, who affirmed on April 16 that “all those who vote for the National Front” are “racists”. She defended herself by saying she was just a “disappointed citizen”, and that if she was really promoting Marine Le Pen, she would have voted for her in the first round (which is apparently not the case) . Times are tough for supporters of the National Rally.
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At the end of the first round of the 2022 presidential election, Marine Le Pen came second with 23.15% of the vote, behind Emmanuel Macron with 27.85% of the vote. The National Rally candidate only got 420,000 votes more than Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who failed in third place with 21.95% of the vote. Marine Le Pen nevertheless obtained a better score than in 2017 (20.3%) and won almost 500,000 more votes (8.1 million voters against 7.6 5 years ago). Its best results are recorded in the departments of northern and eastern France. The candidate came first in 20,000 municipalities out of the approximately 36,000 in the country.
Marine Le Pen has promised to “put France back in order by ensuring the protection of the French”. Several axes were put forward in his program during the campaign such as a “progressive system” allowing retirement from the age of 60, a triptych “protect, plan, transmit”, the superiority of constitutional law over European law to “restore the EU in its place”. It also intends to stop immigration, fight Islamism and raise purchasing power, with the aim of “giving back their money” and “their country” to the French.
The Macron – Le Pen confrontation was quite expected and has already been the subject of numerous polls before and after the first round. Each time, Emmanuel Macron has so far been given the winner of the election, but with a gap that varies according to the sequences and the institutes. Marine Le Pen is sometimes given only 1 to 2 points behind, which is very clearly within the margin of error of the pollsters. As a reminder, during the last presidential election, Marine Le Pen was largely beaten in the second round with 33.90% of the vote against 66.10% for Emmanuel Macron.