President Emmanuel Macron climbs a notch in the daily poll in le Parisien, showing 55% today versus 44.5% for Marine Le Pen, leader of the farright Rassemblement National party, his opponent in the presidential runoff in 2022 France.
The vote on April 24 will be “a choice of civilization,” Macron told the crowd of his supporters in Marseille today, presenting the second round as a “referendum” between two opposing views: “For or against the European Union, for or against ecology, for or against the youth, for or against the republic”. Then he clarified: “I don’t want to do five more years, I want to start anew, I want to completely renew five years.” Macron sent the French to build together “a new ambition”, to “react to all anger, fear “. And given her opponent’s antiimmigrant intentions to ban the veil in all public places, she stressed a desire to “tear down walls and barriers.”
“This is our destiny,” he said, “we are a country of openness. We are made of millennia of migration, of integration. This is French pride”, not “the great separation”. Macron also insisted strongly on his ecological commitment in favor of the Paris Agreement. “The unregulated climate has already started to affect us, we can’t wait any longer,” he said. He then underlined the importance of the choice between him and Marine Le Pen: “Don’t give in to fear, to ‘what it takes’, to the relativism of those who say ‘everything is equal'”.