The candidate for National Regrouping considers it “deeply undemocratic” for people to protest against the results of an election
One week before the second round of the presidential elections in France, thousands of French people demonstrated this Saturday in the streets of Paris and some thirty French cities to say “no” to the extreme right and to Marine Le Pen. The protests against the extreme right managed to gather 22,000 people throughout France, of which 9,200 demonstrated in Paris, according to figures from the French Ministry of the Interior.
Under the slogan “against the extreme right and its ideas, not Marine Le Pen at the Elysée”, the demonstrations had been called throughout France by around thirty French organizations and unions, including SOS Racism, the CGT union, the League of Human Rights (LDH) and the Union of the Judiciary.
«By rejecting Marine Le Pen, it is a question of preventing the advent of a destructive society project of the rule of law, of the democratic, social and solidary republic that we defend every day. It is about denouncing their deceptive program that will hit hard the weakest, the most needy, women, LGBTI people or foreigners,” the organizations denounced in a statement, in which they warned of the danger of reaching the power in France of the extreme right.
Marine Le Pen, a candidate for National Rally, considered it “profoundly undemocratic” that people are going to “demonstrate against the results of an election.” “I think that the French will find it unpleasant to see that their vote is contested in the street through demonstrations,” declared the far-right during an electoral visit to Saint-Rémy-sur-Avre, in central France.
Of the 12 candidates who competed in the first round, only two qualified for the second round as they received the most votes: Macron obtained 27.8% of the vote, followed by Le Pen, with 23.1% of support. The outgoing president and the far-right will face each other at the polls on April 24, five years after they did so for the first time.
«Against the extreme right, for justice and equality. No to Le Pen at the Elysée”, read the banner that opened the Parisian demonstration. “No to the extreme right”, “Come on, let’s kick out Le Pen”, “Extreme right danger” and “More feminism and less fascism” said some banners carried by the protesters.
The vast majority of Parisians taking part in the protest were left-wing or far-left voters, whose candidates were eliminated in the first round. Some will abstain, others will vote in the second round for Macron, with a broken heart, to prevent Le Pen from winning the elections.
«Between two bad options, you have to take the least bad. And the least bad is Emmanuel Macron, “explains Nicolas, who works in a territorial community and who voted in the first round for the socialist Anne Hidalgo. “I am a democrat and I don’t want us to meet fans of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro in power in France,” explains this socialist voter who will vote for Macron next week.
Others are clear: “neither Macron nor Le Pen” is their war cry. “I’m not going to vote and I don’t care what the result is because, anyway, it’s going to be plague or anger,” considers Vicent, who claims to be a committed artist.
“I can’t put Macron’s ballot in the ballot box. It is impossible. I couldn’t
look in the mirror. And I can’t vote for Le Pen, because I could look at myself even less in the mirror,” explains Melanie, an early childhood education teacher and voter for Philippe Poutou, candidate of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) in the first round and abstentionist in the second.
A few meters away from them, Assan, a member of the Young Communists of France (JC) Movement, distributes propaganda urging mobilization in the second round to prevent the extreme right from winning. This young communist has no doubt that it must be done “with the only ballot paper at our disposal, which is that of Emmanuel Macron.”
“We have to fight the extreme right today in the streets and at the polls on Sunday, without a doubt,” says this young communist, who is willing to vote on April 24 for the outgoing president to prevent Le Pen from winning the elections. elections and on the 25th to protest again in the streets against Macron’s policies.
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