Emmanuel Macron is “in panic” over next year’s EU Parliament elections, Marine Le Pen has said, after the President issued an urgent warning against voting for populists.
The globalist French leader’s comments in an interview with Europe 1 Tuesday morning, when he likened anti-mass migration conservative movements in EU countries to 1930s national socialism, were “utterly corny”, according to Le Pen.
Noting Macron’s remarks were “nothing new in French political discourse”, the Rassemblement National (RN, formerly Front National) leader said: “I have the impression that all my life I have been hearing Europe is peace, nation states are war.”
During the interview, Macron stressed his hope that parties “within the republican range” will prevail in the upcoming European elections, which he has previously declared will serve as a battleground between his vision of a globalist EU superstate centred around “human rights” and that of conservative, pro-sovereignty leaders opposed to mass immigration from the third world.
Nationalism is not within that range, he insisted to Europe 1 journalist Nikos Aliagas, asking: “Did we forget which party won the last European elections in France?”
Denouncing Macron’s decision to “scare voters” by “raising the spectre of the 1930s”, as “totally irresponsible”, RN General Secretary Nicolas Bay said the French government was “alone, aside from the Spanish administration, in defending a model of mass immigration”.
Taken alongside an advertisement launched by the government last week urging citizens to vote in May’s EU elections, which was slammed by the opposition and large parts of France’s political class for its alarmist tone, Le Pen said the President’s comments “provided proof that there is a real panic of power in the face of election which he knows will most likely result in a drubbing for him”.
The RN and the LREM (Macron’s La Republique En Marche!) are currently almost neck and neck with regards to voting intentions for next year’s European elections, according to an Ifop poll released Sunday, which showed Le Pen’s populist party edge ahead of the globalist self-styled ‘centrist’ bloc for the first time, as Breitbart London previously reported.
In a piece describing Le Pen as “the Donald Trump of France”, Vanity Fair said the figures revealed “that the battle for the French republic, torn between nativism and globalism, is trending decidedly in [the RN leader’s] favour”.