PARIS: Far-right voters may decide who becomes France’s next president after anti-immigration crusader Marine Le Pen’s record first-round election score jolted the race between Socialist frontrunner Francois Hollande and incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.
The centre-left Hollande narrowly beat the conservative Sarkozy in Sunday’s 10-candidate first round by 28.6 per cent to 27.1 per cent, the Interior Ministry said with 99 per cent of votes counted, but Le Pen stole the show by surging to 18.0 per cent, the biggest result for a far-right candidate.
Her breakthrough mirrored advances by anti-establishment Eurosceptical populists from Amsterdam and Vienna to Helsinki and Athens as anger over austerity, unemployment and bailout fatigue deepen due to the euro zone’s grinding debt crisis. “The battle of France has only just begun,” Le Pen, 43, daughter of former paratrooper and National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, told cheering supporters on Sunday.
Declaring that her wave of support was “shaking the system” of mainstream consensus politics, she said: “Nothing will be the same again.”
The gravel-voiced blonde, who wants France to abandon the euro currency, said she would give her view on the runoff at a May Day rally in Paris next week. But she saved most venom for Sarkozy, a im ing to pick up the pieces in any recomposition of the right and hoping the Front can enter parliament in June.
National Front Vice-President Louis Alliot suggested on Monday that Le Pen would not formally endorse either candidate “as things stand”. “Based on the ideas in our programme, neither one defends or develops them, so it seems unlikely,” he said.(Reuters)