Paulo Marques, mayor of Aulnay-sous-Bois who chaired the Portuguese commission that supported candidate Valérie Pecres in the first round of the elections, told Lusa news agency.
For this Franco-Portuguese mayor, defeating his candidate “wasn’t easy”, but now that Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen in the second round of the French presidential election, Paulo Marquez believes right-wing voters are on their way, “with a sense of responsibility”, keep a will Pecres, which asked his supporters not to vote for the extreme right. However, it will not be enough for Emmanuel Macron to win.
“There can’t be many votes for Valérie Pécresse because she didn’t get 5%. If he gets 2%, i.e. a million voters or so, that’s very little and that’s why Emmanuel Macron is trying to win the Marines’ vote. And in turn, she wants to win,” Le Pen explained. The voices of Jean-Luc Mélenchon”.
With 28% of the vote in the first round, Emmanuel Macron is now trying to gain ground, speed up the election campaign and tour France to explain his platform, but there is little time left for the final vote.
“It was a good result, in the sense that it got more votes than it did in 2017, but we can’t be complacent because we saw people’s discontent and many protest votes. Voters are tempted with bogus promises and it’s hard to fight against bogus ideas. I’m very concerned “, Rosa André, the French-Portuguese chancellor and municipal councilor in Saint-Germain-en-Laye has warned about the Marche Republic party that supports the president.
Vitor Costa, who was part of the climate agreement that set citizens’ priorities for the environment in France, ran in the municipal elections in Yvonne, Burgundy, for the Greens, but voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the presidential election, declaring that he would not vote for a second comeback.
“In the first round, I voted for Jean-Luc Melénchon because he seemed to me to have the best ideas for pensions and also for the environment. He was the one on the left who was most likely to make it to the second round. Now I’m not going to vote, I don’t care about either. . For the environment, either one is the worst that can happen,” he declared.
Like Vitor Costa, both Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen’s camp fear there will be a massive abstention in the second round, which would overturn the polls that currently give the president an advantage, with around 53.5% of the vote.
Vitor Costa has been invited to run for legislative elections scheduled for June, but says he disagrees with environmentalists.
“I think they end up hurting the environmental cause because they are very radical ideas. They are against hunting, I know hunting laws have to evolve, but I myself am an accidental hunter and that can’t be banned, there has to be a debate,” he defended.
The national debate now focuses on purchasing power, with the cost of living for the French rising daily, driven by rising energy prices. A topic that ends with the concealment of political extremism in Marine Le Pen’s program.
Paulo Marquez, who leads the CÍVICA association, stressed that “Marine Le Pen wants to remove the human rights of all of us, equality. Marine Le Pen will ban Portuguese mayors in France for giving importance to our Portuguese origins,” which includes all selected places of Portuguese origin in France.
Until April 24, the two candidates were on the path to persuading the reluctant French, and on April 20, they would take part in the only debate in this second round of elections, one of the key moments of this second round. .
“We have cut short the campaign due to international events, the president cannot campaign in the first round and this prevented him from communicating well with the electorate. I want to see him now as a fighter as always in the debate and I want him to explain her actions to the French,” concluded Rosa Andre.