Presidential candidate launches campaign with pledge to dump the euro and claim that Islamic practices are a threat to France

Marine Le Pen has formally launched her presidential campaign, promising to put France first by freeing it it from the “tyrannies” of globalisation, Islamic fundamentalism and the European Union.

As the most unpredictable election in decades picked up pace, Le Pen, leader of the nationalist Front National, and far-left independent rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon, both staged major rallies in Lyon on Sunday – a day after the new frontrunner, centrist Emmanuel Macron, drew large crowds in the same city.

The election has been thrown open since allegations that the longstanding centre-right favourite, François Fillon, paid his wife and children close to €1m of public money for parliamentary assistance jobs that investigators suspect she did not do.

Opinion polls have consistently predicted Le Pen will win the first round of the two-stage contest in April but be defeated in the 7 May run-off by a mainstream candidate. With support for Fillon plunging, two polls last week suggested that could be Macron.

“What is at stake in this election is the continuity of France as a free nation, our existence as a people,” Le Pen, daughter of the Front National founder, Jean-Marie, told cheering supporters at the Lyon congress centre.

“The French have been dispossessed of their patriotism. They are suffering in silence from not being allowed to love their country … The divide is no longer between the left and the right, but between the patriots and the globalists.”

Rehearsing themes familiar from the successful Donald Trump and Brexit campaigns, Le Pen said the momentum was clearly now on her side. From the US to Italy and Austria to the UK, she said: “The people are waking – the tide of history has turned.”

She was speaking at the end of a two-day event with party militants during which the anti-immigration, anti-EU Front National unveiled its election campaign platform consisting of 144 “commitments” to the French people.

Published on Saturday, the document, notably short on macro-economic and practical detail, pledges to take France out of the eurozone and – unless the EU agrees to revert to a loose coalition of nations with neither a single currency nor a border-free area – to hold a referendum on France’s EU membership.

An FN government would tax imports and foreigners’ job contracts, lower the retirement age, raise welfare benefits and cut income tax while curbing migration, slashing crime rates, expelling illegal migrants and hiring 15,000 new police officers. It would also reserve free education for French nationals, and enforce a “French first” policy in social housing and employment.

French journalist thrown out of Marine Le Pen press conference Read more

Le Pen said Islamic fundamentalism was a “yoke” France could no longer live under. Muslim veils, mosques and street prayers were cultural threats “no French person … attached to his dignity can accept”; radical Islamist prayer centres would be closed down and hate preachers expelled.

“Financial globalisation and Islamist globalisation are helping each other out,” she said. “Those two ideologies aim to bring France to its knees.”

Without mentioning them by name, the FN leader took a swipe at her rivals on “the cash-rich right and the cash-rich left”, declaring that she was “only the candidate of the people”.

That was a reference not just to the socially conservative, ultra-liberal Fillon but also to Macron, the energetic 39-year-old former investment banker and economy minister who is promising to break what he calls the “complacency and vacuity” of the French political system.

Economically liberal and pro-business, Macron is also progressive on social issues. The pro-European moderate packed out an 8,000-seat venue in Lyon on Saturday, and had almost as many more watching on a big screen outside.

Le Pen, he said, “does not speak in the name of the people”, and would “betray France’s ideals” of liberty, equality and fraternity. “Some today pretend to be talking in the name of the people, but they are just ventriloquists,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron during his speech at a meeting in Lyon on Saturday. Photograph: Michel Euler/AP

“They betray liberty by shrinking our horizons, they betray equality by stating that some are more equal than others, they betray fraternity because they hate faces that don’t look like theirs,” he said to cheers from the largely youthful crowd.



Macron, who has been accused of vagueness about his policies and has yet to publish a full manifesto – still less say how he would fund his initiatives – said he wanted to “reconcile the two Frances that have been growing apart for too long”.

He said he aimed to revive France’s economy through innovation, cutting bureaucracy and relaxing still-tough labour laws, as well as raising the defence budget to 2% of GDP, hiring more police officers and increasing education funding.

Macron’s chances of advancing to the second round are seen as significantly better since the Socialist party of the discredited outgoing president, François Hollande, selected a radical leftwinger, Benoît Hamon, as the party’s candidate.

He has also benefited from Fillon’s woes. The centre-right Les Républicains candidate faced calls at the weekend from members of his own party and a heavyweight centrist, François Bayrou, to withdraw from the race over the deepening financial controversies implicating his family.

An influential Les Républicains senator, Bruno Gilles, said the party had “turned the page” and wanted a new candidate. “This scandal is doing us more damage every day, and we can’t wait another two weeks,” he said.



An opinion poll in the Journal du Dimanche showed that only 23% of French voters now felt Fillon was honest, against 50% last November.



Also addressing cheering crowds in Lyon – and, via a hologram, in Aubervilliers, outside Paris – was the hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Socialist minister who finished fourth in France’s 2012 presidential elections with the backing of the Communist party.

The tub-thumping leftwinger said France should pull out of its EU treaties, denounced the “Uberisation” of the economy, pledged more investment in culture, and promised a new constitution “written by the people, not granted to them”.

“My candidacy is about intransigence and strong demands,” he said. “I am the representative of the stubborn and the rebellious. I ask just one thing: even if you don’t vote for my programme, do read it.”

