The candidates Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen gave, almost simultaneously, two meetings yesterday Saturday February 5. The first opened the ball at 3 p.m. in Lille. The second spoke from Reims at the start of the evening.
The former polemicist and candidate for Reconquest set the tone from the northern city on the economic side by criticizing Saturday afternoon “the assistantship” which, according to him, promotes immigration.
While several hundred anti-racist demonstrators demonstrated in the streets of Lille, with some tension and tear gas shots, Eric Zemmour, in the face of 8,000 conquered supporters gathered at the Grand Palais in Lille, held a speech focused on purchasing power to “give hope” that “labour France is waiting”. “Here even more than elsewhere, the assistantship (of social assistance) is an insult”, he lambasted.
For her part, in Reims, Marine Le Pen took care not to cite her main competitor from the hard right, instead attacking – and violently – Emmanuel Macron, “this so-called Mozart of finance who did not succeed to compose only a dramatic symphony, leaving a debt increased by 600 billion euros”, she launched.
“We were promised a crack, but the only crash we had was financial,” she said again, before adding that, according to her, “Macronism is the terrible synthesis of cynicism and injustice. It is a machine for crushing hopes under the guise of progressivism. Emmanuel Macron is not only contemptuous, he is depressing”.
Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour neck and neck
Marine Le Pen, whom a latest poll gives tied with her rival Eric Zemmour (14%) behind Valérie Pécresse (16.5%) and Emmanuel Macron (24%), accused President Macron of being responsible for the ” regression” of a “multi-traumatized”, “abandoned” and “wild” France.
A heavy burden which decided with the end of her speech concluded on a more personal note, a rare exercise for her, during which she spoke of her journey confessing “to have sometimes failed”, “to have fallen” and “to have always gotten up again “.
Perhaps enough to close for Marine Le Pen a sequence for the less hectic with serial defections in favor of Eric Zemmour. Despite the departure of three MEPs and regional advisers for her adversary’s camp, Marine Le Pen had also affirmed it before her rally: the time, she said, is for “efficiency and serenity”.
In an interview with Le Figaro on February 3, the candidate had however criticized her rival for “attracting sulphurous characters” from the former National Front: “traditionalist Catholics, pagans and a few Nazis”.
But “tired of the noise and fury”, the RN candidate says she now wants to insist on “concrete solutions” by relaunching her campaign in Reims, where she was able to count on some 4,000 activists.
Marine Le Pen was finally able to count on a video message of support from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who had received it in the fall. It remains to be seen whether this “pledge of seriousness” will allow him to make a difference and change the situation.