Le Pen opponents plan to put votes ‘right

Leftist alliance and President Emmanuel Macron’s party withdraw almost all their third-place candidates to try to impede Marine Le Pen’s party.

Marine Le Pen arrives at party's headquarters in Paris. Picture: AFP

Opponents of Marine Le Pen have agreed to try to pool their voter support against candidates of her far-right party in the final round of the French elections on Sunday, lowering the odds that it will win enough seats to control the French parliament.

A leftist alliance called The New Popular Front and a bloc led by President Emmanuel Macron withdrew their third-place candidates from races in 221 districts, according to a tally by Le Monde, accounting for nearly 90 per cent of districts with a three-way race where Ms Le Pen’s candidate came in first or second.

The idea is to create head-to-head match-ups between left-wing or centrist candidates against National Rally’s contenders in the final round of voting in these districts. The parties hope the supporters of the withdrawn candidates will swing behind the other non-NR candidate.

Markets appeared buoyed by the development on Wednesday, with French stocks up around 1.5 per cent and yields on French government debt falling.

National Rally and its allies led after the first round in 296 districts, putting the bloc within reach of securing a majority in the 577-seat National Assembly after the final round. That would compel Mr Macron to name a prime minister from Ms Le Pen’s ranks, a stunning rise for a party that voters long considered taboo because of its anti-Semitic past.

Much of France’s political class considers the threat so dire that politicians are counselling their supporters to vote for candidates of starkly different ideologies rather than the NR. Edouard Philippe, the centre-right Mayor of Le Havre and a former Macron prime minister, said he would vote for the communist party candidate in his district rather than the one from NR on Sunday.

“I don’t do it with a happy heart,” Mr Philippe said. “I prefer an elected official who I know … who seems to me to meet the democratic demands that I share, rather than National Rally.”

Still, there were 29 races in which the NR candidate came in first or second in the first round of voting and the third-place candidate did not withdraw. It also remains unclear whether support-ers of Mr Macron’s party will vote for candidates in the leftist alliance from France Unbowed, a far-left party that is nearly as polarising as NR. France Unbowed’s strident criticism of Israel after the Hamas attack on October 7 has drawn accusations that it is fuelling a sharp rise in anti-Semitic acts in France.

An IFOP poll released on Tuesday found candidates from the Socialist Party and the Greens – part of the leftist alliance – would narrowly defeat NR head-to-head, as would candidates from Mr Macron’s bloc. France Unbowed candidates, however, are in a dead heat with NR.

Mr Philippe said he wouldn’t counsel his supporters to vote for a candidate from Unbowed, calling it a party that “accommodated anti-Semitic statements.”

France’s government finances could be in for a difficult stretch, whether NR secures a majority or not. The party has pledged to cut energy taxes, measures that would likely swell France’s already-large government deficit. A hung parliament would make it difficult to bring the deficit down.

“The implications for medium-term growth would likely be negative relative to the status quo, as neither of the two electoral outcomes would lead to ... further structural reforms,” Gold-man Sachs analysts said.

The Wall Street Journal