Thousands of people demonstrated on Saturday in the streets of numerous cities in France against the leader of the extreme right, Marine Le Pen, candidate for the presidential election against the current head of state, Emmanuel Macron.
Some 22,000 people took part in the marches across France, 9,200 of them in Paris, according to Interior Ministry figures.
“A vote that reeks of a vote that kills is better,” read one of the banners at the capital rally.
Many protesters said they will vote for Macron, even if they are contrary to his ideas, to prevent Le Pen from being elected.
But other banners showed at the same time the refusal of many voters to resort to the so-called “Republican front”, that is, to vote for the candidate against the extreme right to prevent his arrival to power.
“Neither Macron nor Le Pen” was one of those slogans, on a day in which there was also an anti-Macron protest in Paris, organized by the former number two of Marine Le Pen, Florian Philippot, who assured on social networks that “a million people” were expected. Finally, it was a few hundred people.
Video via Twitter: @SimOnTheWay
This Saturday night closes the consultation that the party La Francia Insoumise, of the leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has organized to ask its supporters what the position of the party should be: vote for Macron to avoid Le Pen or abstain or vote blank.
According to the latest polls, published in the magazine “L’Obs” and which give the Liberal candidate the victory with a very narrow difference, up to 40% of Mélenchon voters would be willing to abstain or vote blank on April 24, 29% would vote for Le Pen and 31% for Macron.
Mélenchon won more than 7.7 million votes in the first round, 22% of the vote, behind Le Pen’s 23.1% and Macron’s 27.8%.
Unlike other leaders on the left, Mélenchon has called for a vote against Le Pen, but has not called for a vote for Macron.
Ecology occupied a good part of the media discourse this Saturday, also at Macron’s rally, which dedicated his speech to announcing policies that, he said, will multiply the ecological actions of the next five years.
In front of him, Le Pen, who has promised to dismantle all wind power generators because they “spoil the landscape”, considered the announcements of his opponent as a “punitive ecology” in front of his program of “national ecology”, which according to several NGOs “makes us fear the worst”.
In the early hours of the morning, blockades were also registered in one of the main arteries of the capital, the great boulevards, where a hundred militants of the environmental collective Extinction Rebellion began a three-day action blocking traffic to denounce “the inaction” of political leaders in the face of global warming.
