This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
Le Pen and Macron Clash in Vicious Presidential Debate in France
Le Pen and Macron Clash in Vicious Presidential Debate in France
(about 1 hour later)
PARIS — Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron faced each other on Wednesday evening in their only head-to-head debate before a runoff election on Sunday for the French presidency. The debate quickly turned vicious; she portrayed him as a heartless and unpatriotic capitalist, while he called her a self-serving liar and a dangerous extremist.
PARIS — He said she was telling lies. She called him arrogant. He accused her of repeating “stupidities.” She cut him off and told him not lecture her. He shook his head sadly and she laughed sarcastically.
Ms. Le Pen, the fiery leader of the far-right National Front, railed against globalization and immigration, and portrayed her rival as weak on terrorism. Mr. Macron, a centrist independent and former economy minister running for office for the first time, acknowledged the gravity of France’s problems and derided Ms. Le Pen’s proposals as simplistic. The wide-ranging debate touched on France’s 20th-century history, including the World War II-era roundup of Jews and the Algerian War, and on Islamist fundamentalism and the future of the European Union.
The debate on Wednesday night between France’s two presidential candidates, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front and the centrist former economy minister Emmanuel Macron, was more like an angry American-style television shoutfest than the reasoned discussion of issues the French have become accustomed to. It was a study in violent verbal combat: The two talked angrily over each other, cut each other off, shook fists and pointed fingers, leaving the moderators bewildered and helpless.
Ms. Le Pen, smiling and mocking in tone, opened by trying to tie Mr. Macron to the deeply unpopular President François Hollande, under whom he served as economy minister.
But it was also a stark demonstration of two radically different visions of France that voters will have to choose between on Sunday in the election’s final round. Mr. Macron, 39, the former banker and cool technocrat, educated at France’s finest schools and the beneficiary of a meteoric rise, faced off against Ms. Le Pen, 48, the scion of one of the country’s most notorious political families, the inheritor of a far-right party who has tried to move it toward the center.
“Mr. Macron is the candidate of savage globalization,” Ms. Le Pen said in her opening statement, portraying herself as a defender of small businesses and farmers and Mr. Macron, a former investment banker, as a soulless financier serving the interests of big business and the European Union. She said he would promote a capitalist “war of all against all.”
The two candidates did not hide their disdain for each other, and their total divergence on all the issues — Europe, terrorism, France’s stagnant economy, Russia — explained why.
Mr. Macron cast Ms. Le Pen as the heir to an ugly far-right tradition in France. “Over 40 years in this country, we’ve had Le Pens who’ve been candidates for the presidency,” he said, tying Ms. Le Pen to her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the far-right National Front and ran for president in 2002 and 2007.
“The high priestess of fear is sitting in front of me,” Mr. Macron said derisively, having cast his opponent as a dangerous extremist with deep ties to her party’s dark past. He made a point of repeating her name, to remind viewers of her parental filiation: her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded the National Front and is associated with its historical posture of anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and stigmatization of immigrants.
Mr. Macron said the question was whether the French wanted “the spirit of defeat,” and said that in contrast,“I carry the spirit of French conquest, because France has always succeeded, France has always succeeded in the world.”
“You are the France of submission,” Ms. Le Pen said with scorn; Mr. Macron was merely a heartless banker, in her view. “We’ve seen the choice you’ve made, the cynical choices, that reveal the coldness of the investment banker you have never ceased being.”
The first question was about the economy, especially the unemployment rate, which is particularly high among the young.
He leads her by 20 points in polls and is considered likely to win on Sunday. The debate is expected to move some voters, but not enough to make up for Ms. Le Pen’s substantial polling deficit. She has seen some slight improvement in recent polls, and was clearly hoping to destabilize her younger opponent as she did in the first-round debates, when other candidates were present. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, she went for direct frontal attacks.
“We must give our small and medium-size enterprises the opportunity to create more jobs,” Mr. Macron said, urging the government to simplify regulations and make it easier for businesses to start — and to fail. “Your strategy is simply to say a lot of lies and say everything that is wrong in the country, but you are not proposing anything,” he told Ms. Le Pen.
But Mr. Macron generally kept his cool, laying out his program point by point through the shouting, while Ms. Le Pen, true to the scrappy, guerrilla-style party that she leads — it is stronger on combat than on policy — spent much of the two-and-a-half-hour contest attacking him. What policy proposals she offered appeared sketchy.
She retorted that her rival represented only corporate interests. “You do not think of the best interests of the nation,” she said. “You defend private interests.” She referred sarcastically to “your friends with whom you get drinks at La Rotonde,” referring to a dinner Mr. Macron had at an upscale Paris restaurant after the first round of the election, a meal that has been used to portray him as out of touch.
Mr. Macron offered his view of a France open to Europe and free trade; staying in the common currency; reinforcing its ties with European nations; dealing firmly with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia; and overhauling France’s stultifying and voluminous labor code in order, he said, to generate more jobs.
The conversation then turned to a Whirlpool tumble dryer factory in Amiens, Mr. Macron’s hometown, that is threatened with closure. Ms. Le Pen made a surprise visit to the plant last week as Mr. Macron was meeting with union leaders; some workers jeered him after he, too, visited the factory, although he mollified some of them by discussing their concerns.
“We are in the world,” Mr. Macron said. “France is not a closed country.”
In one exchange, Ms. Le Pen said that she would tax the products of companies that outsourced jobs and that she wanted to set up a sovereign investment fund, led by chief executives, to invest in struggling French companies.
Ms. Le Pen depicted a France of “total collapse of our industries,” preyed upon by Islamist extremists, demanding ever more government protection from economic vicissitudes and urgently needing to close its borders. “I’m the candidate of that France that we love, who will protect our frontiers, who will protect us from savage globalization,” she said at the outset.
Mr. Macron said such programs already existed. As the exchange became increasingly heated, Mr. Macron accused Ms. Le Pen of peddling “nonsense” and she shot back, “Don’t play with me.”
Mr. Macron was a ruthless capitalist in Ms. Le Pen’s familiar neo-populist depiction, ready to sell French industry down the river to hurt workers and help employers. She repeatedly tied Mr. Macron to the failed government of the incumbent Socialist president, François Hollande, in which Mr. Macron served for two years before quitting to start his own political movement.
“I’m not playing, unfortunately — it’s sad,” he said.
“You defend private interests,” Ms. Le Pen sneered. “And behind that there is social ruin.”
“I see that you are trying to play student and teacher with me, but as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t particularly my thing,” Ms. Le Pen continued, in what could be seen as a reference to Mr. Macron’s wife, his former drama teacher in high school, where the pair met and started a relationship despite their age difference of 24 years.
Mr. Macron replied evenly, “What’s extraordinary is that your strategy is simply to say a lot of lies, and propose nothing to help the country.” He pointed out the weaknesses in her generous spending plans, noting the lack of revenue-raising measures to back them. “France and the French deserve better,” he said. “Don’t say stupid things. You are saying a lot of them.”
Some of the sharpest exchanges occurred around the topic of terrorism, which has claimed about 240 lives in France since the beginning of 2015.
Some of the sharpest exchanges came over terrorism, which polls show is a major preoccupation for the French. Ms. Le Pen cast herself as tougher on the issue, reeling off a series of antiterrorism measures — experts have suggested that they are either impractical or ineffective — and saying Mr. Macron was a weakling on security. Nonetheless, it is one of her signature issues, always drawing a thunderous response when she invokes it at rallies.
Ms. Le Pen called for stripping the French citizenship of people of dual nationality who are suspected of terrorist activity; closing mosques suspected of fostering extremism; expelling hate preachers; securing France’s borders; and expanding prisons. Mr. Macron called for better intelligence gathering and sharing, the hiring of more police officers, and intensifying online surveillance of extremist activities.
“You are for laxism,” Ms. Le Pen said. “You are complaisant toward Islamist fundamentalism,” she said. “We’ve got to eradicate fundamentalist ideologies. You won’t do it, because they support you.”
“We must attack the root of evil — the root of the evil is the exponential development of Islamic fundamentalism on our territory,” Ms. Le Pen said.
Bristling, Mr. Macron pointed out the impracticality of expelling the thousands of people who are in the government’s so-called S-files because they are considered to constitute some potential danger to the country’s security. “The S-Files are just information files,” Mr. Macron said. “You can be an S-filer merely for having crossed paths with a jihadist.
Mr. Macron, citing the findings of Gilles Kepel, a scholar of Islam, said that a victory by Ms. Le Pen, with her anti-Islamic message, was a fervent wish of jihadists who wanted a war of religions. He said Ms. Le Pen’s proposal to strip citizenship from suspected terrorists would do nothing to stop a determined suicide bomber, and he called her antiterrorism proposals “snake oil.”
“You’ve got to be much more surgical than Ms. Le Pen,” he added. “What you are proposing, as usual, is merely powder,” he said, pointing out that as a deputy in the European Parliament she voted repeatedly against antiterrorism measures.
France’s history also came up. Ms. Le Pen accused Mr. Macron of propagating hatred by calling France’s colonization of Algeria a crime against humanity; Mr. Macron has said he regretted any offense he had caused. Soon after, Mr. Macron attacked Ms. Le Pen’s denial of French responsibility for the roundup of French Jews during World War II.
She dismissed these criticisms, as she did the entire European Union project. Under her, she said, “French laws will be superior to laws given out by some commissioner whose name we don’t even know.”
“France was not guilty of this appalling horror,” Ms. Le Pen said of the notorious 1942 roundup of Jews in a stadium known as the Vel’ d’Hiv. She said that she blamed the collaborationist Vichy regime for the roundup, and said she did not consider it to have been the legitimate government at the time. (Charles de Gaulle’s government in exile in London was, she added.)
Mr. Macron posited a diametrically opposed view, insisting that France’s place was in a stronger Europe that could stand up to Mr. Putin’s Russia and President Trump’s United States. Ms. Le Pen’s idea is that “we’re going to leave Europe because the others can make it, but we can’t,” he said. “In the face of this spirit of defeat, I am for the spirit of conquest, because France has always succeeded.”
The two candidates clashed on the euro and on the European Union; Mr. Macron said that European institutions needed reform, while Ms. Le Pen said he would bend to the will of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. France’s real competitor is China, not Germany, he replied.
Mr. Macron said a strong and united Europe would be the best response to the populist message put forth by President Trump, and he castigated Ms. Le Pen for her coziness with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. Ms. Le Pen said France should be “equidistant” from both Russia and the United States. “Russia has not expressed hostility toward France,” she said. “I do not care what the relations between the United States and Russia are.”
As the debate headed toward its close — with the moderators, the journalists Christophe Jakubyszyn and Nathalie Saint-Cricq, having largely let each candidate frequently interrupt the other — the candidates leveled final attacks.
“You are unworthy of being the guarantor of our institutions,” Mr. Macron said, casting his rival as an extremist threat to democracy. “You are a threat to our institutions. That’s your problem.”
In closing statements, each candidate recalled defining themes. Mr. Macron said Ms. Le Pen was running on a project of lies and fear. “The France I want will not be divided,” he said, calling her a “parasite” that had emerged from the ineffectiveness of traditional politics.
Ms. Le Pen said, “I like France as it is, with its culture, with its heritage, with its language.” She portrayed Mr. Macron as an advocate of globalization and privatization who would open the country to “mass immigration” and weaken France’s social bonds.
Mr. Macron placed first, and Ms. Le Pen second, in the first round, on April 23, edging out nine other candidates, including François Fillon from the center-right Republicans; Benoît Hamon, the Socialist candidate; and the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Sunday will be the first runoff election in the history of the French Fifth Republic, which began in 1958, without a candidate from the two major parties participating. Mr. Fillon and Mr. Hamon have thrown their support to Mr. Macron, but Mr. Mélenchon has demurred, saying only that he could not vote for Ms. Le Pen.
