French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen has paused her election campaign over a lack of official endorsements needed for her to run for office in April.
Rassemblement National’s (RN, formerly Front National) presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, suspended her campaign on Tuesday over a lack of official endorsements from relevant public officials.
These endorsements are essential for running for the French Presidency, within 500 signatures from elected officials required in order to get on the ballot.
According to a Le Monde report however, Le Pen remains significantly short of that number, despite currently placing second in current polling.
The populist candidate is currently missing 134 of the necessary sponsorships, making a desperate appeal for endorsements to French mayors on Monday in the hopes she can scrape onto the ballot.
“I appeal to the mayors: if you do not help me, millions of voters will be deprived of an election,” Le Pen’s campaign reports the candidate as saying. “Don’t let a major democratic scandal happen.”
Le Pen has since suspended her campaign, postponing a number of events in order to focus on obtaining enough signatures to make the next stage of the election before the March 4 deadline.
“The situation is catastrophic,” Le Pen’s deputy campaign director reportedly told Le Figaro, noting that none of the candidate’s staff had ever seen the likes of this situation before.
While Le Pen is the first to take such drastic action as to suspend her campaign over the issue, she is far from the only candidate struggling to meet the signature quota.
Populist firebrand Éric Zemmour is in an even deeper hole than the National Rally veteran, currently requiring 209 more endorsements from public officials to make the cut for the first run-off.
Meanwhile, far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon has also struggled to meet the quota, having only 400 of the 500 signatures as of mid-January despite placing fifth in the overall polls.
So bad is the issue that the Mouvement Démocrate party has committed to setting up a website dedicated to obtaining signatures for any presidential candidate polling at 10 per cent or higher.
The party has also reportedly built up a reserve of 300 official signatures for such candidates in the hopes of preventing popular presidential hopefuls from slipping through the cracks of the French electoral system.
“Can candidates who are at this level be excluded from the election by the sponsorship mechanism?” asked the party’s leader, François Bayrou.
“I do not share the political opinion of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, but I would find abnormal, and even scandalous, that they cannot present themselves,” he also noted.