Status: 11.04.2022 2:07 p.m
Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Asselborn is concerned about the high approval ratings for right-wing candidates in France. If Le Pen wins the run-off, he sees the values of the EU at risk. Other politicians called for voting.
Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn has expressed his concern after the first round of the presidential elections in France. “They are in a kind of political civil war,” he said on the sidelines of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg. As a result, the right-wing extremists received more than twice as many votes as in Germany. This is “very, very worrying.”
The election of the right-wing populist candidate Marine Le Pen, for example, would mean an upheaval in Europe as a community of values and would change the entire EU. “The French would have to prevent Le Pen from winning the elections,” said Asselborn. “I hope it turns out that we don’t have Le Pen in the European Union as French President.”
Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra called on people in France to go to the polls in the run-off election in just under two weeks, given the low turnout. Russia’s attack on the democratic government in Ukraine “reminds us all of the tremendous importance of democracy, human rights and the rule of law,” Hoekstra said.
“Now gather everyone behind Emmanuel Macron”
Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, as German foreign minister, did not want to comment on national affairs. “But as a European at heart, it is important to me that we stand together as Europeans, especially in these times.”
SPD parliamentary group leader Achim Post described Macron’s victory as the “first step” in ensuring that France would continue to be governed in a pro-European manner. It is to be welcomed that the third-placed left-wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has already spoken out clearly against electing Le Pen.
Michael Roth, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag, tweeted: “Now everyone gathers behind Emmanuel Macron”. Roth added: “He or the fall of a united Europe. Sounds pathetic. But it is true.”
Jean-Marie Le Pen: daughter is future president
Marine Le Pen had previously made it into the runoff against incumbent Emmanuel Macron in the first round of the presidential election. According to the preliminary final result, Head of State Macron is only slightly ahead of Le Pen with 27.8 percent of the votes, who has 23.2 percent of the votes. Both will now compete against each other in a runoff election on April 24th.
Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie, founder of the right-wing Front National party, already sees his daughter as the winner of the election. In the newspaper “Le Parisien” the 93-year-old already called his daughter “the future President of the Republic”. The result was remarkable, he says. During the election campaign, he had supported the right-wing extremist candidate Éric Zemmour, thereby opposing his daughter.
Marine Le Pen, who took over the leadership of the party from her father, sought to adopt a more moderate stance after losing to Macron in the 2017 election. In an attempt to demonize the party and thereby gain elections in the middle-right and centre-right electorate, she renamed it the “Rassemblement National”.
Ségolène Royal shares the blame with left-wing candidates
The well-known socialist Ségolène Royal blamed the failed left-wing candidates for Le Pen’s success in the first round of the presidential election. Several candidates from the left spectrum apparently competed because of their ego despite poor poll numbers and ended up with less than five percent of the votes, Royal said on BFMTV. “If they had withdrawn from the race, we would have Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the second ballot and France would enjoy a real, fundamental debate, a real choice between values and strategies.” The voters would have expected a unification of the left.
According to the Paris Ministry of the Interior, Mélenchon was only around 1.5 percentage points behind Le Pen after almost all the votes had been counted and thus narrowly missed making it into the runoff. In the 2007 presidential election, Royal herself was a Socialist candidate in the runoff against the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, who then became President.