A final meeting for the home stretch: one week before the European election, Jordan Bardella, head of the RN list, gathered his people on Sunday afternoon in Paris, calling in a show of force on his supporters for “unity” and mobilization”. “Don’t be a spectator of (France’s) decline: become an actor in its recovery and come alongside us,” he said at the conclusion of a speech given to more than 5,000 supporters at the Paris Dôme, while an Elabe poll published on Saturday evening credits him with 32.5% of voting intentions.
In his forty-minute speech, the head of the far-right party called on voters not to abstain as much as not to “disperse” to other lists, returning to the fundamentals of Lepenism: “I ask you to never apologize for being proud to be French. To all French people, love it (France, Editor’s note), and join us.” A few minutes earlier, Marine Le Pen had also urged “not to remain on the sidelines, a passive spectator or a victim”: “You must be able to say ‘I was there, I was there’+”, while the flame movement could reach its best score next Sunday in the first round of a national election.
Continue to occupy media space
The boss of the RN must still hold press interviews all week, a way of repeating his call to go to the polls. It will also be a question of not leaving all the media space to the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron, on the front line for the commemorations of the Normandy Landings, which must be joined by American President Joe Biden. The presidential majority, led by Valérie Hayer, is counting on this memorial sequence to remobilize the pro-European camp that it intends to embody.
The President of the Republic will also grant an interview to France2 and TF1 on Thursday live from Caen in the 8:00 p.m. news, during which he will speak on the European elections and the situation in Ukraine and Gaza. After a meeting in Aubervilliers on Saturday, Ms. Hayer continued to plow the land on Sunday. “We are not giving up (…) Let’s wake up, we have the means to win this election,” she said during a meeting in Saint-Fuscien (Somme) on Sunday, alongside the former Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne and UDI President Hervé Marseille.
Macronie’s slogan for this last week: “Nothing is decided”, despite voting intentions stuck around 16%. “Obviously”, that Ms Hayer’s list can come first, said Prime Minister Gabriel Attal on France 3. “We are fighting for that”, he underlined.
“Faded version”
On the left too, the time has come for mobilization, in search of a volatile electorate. With a survival challenge for EELV, while the list led by Marie Toussaint is struggling to assert itself, the polls placing it dangerously close to the 5% threshold necessary to send deputies to Brussels. The candidate, who never managed to get her campaign off the ground, held a large public meeting on Sunday afternoon in Aubervilliers, in front of some 1,600 people.
Targets of her criticism, “the brown pact” proposed according to her by the extreme right, but also her competitors on the left, in particular Raphaël Glucksman, whom she accused of taking up the ideas of environmentalists “in a watered-down version”. The challenge for the left is also to determine who will gain the upper hand in view of 2027, while the leader of the Insoumis Jean-Luc Mélenchon had launched the campaign of his candidate Manon Aubry by affirming that it was the “first round of the presidential election”.
Does he expect results below his expectations? During a meeting in Garges-lès-Gonesse (Val-d’Oise), he announced the upcoming creation by the rebellious deputies of a commission of inquiry into the way in which “elections take place in France”. “When it’s working-class neighborhoods, there are radiations, there are lots of professions of faith posted on mailboxes (…) We’re fed up,” declared the founder of LFI.
Head of the PS-Place publique list, Raphaël Glucksmann reaffirmed on BFMTV his desire to “set a clear course” on the left, “breaking with what La France insoumise is doing”. Elabe predicted he would be three points shy of Ms Hayer, but another survey on Friday placed him just one point shy of the majority.