PARIS - Far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who
stunned France by seizing almost a fifth of presidential first round votes,
said she was waiting for answers from President Nicolas Sarkozy before telling
her supporters how to vote in a runoff.
After Le Pen took third place in Sunday's ballot
with the National Front's top score in a national election, centre-right
Sarkozy and Socialist frontrunner Francois Hollande have courted her voters,
who may decide the May 6 second round result.
Sarkozy's overtures have been more direct, saying
that he respects National Front voters and would not criticise a vote for a
party which has long been stigmatised.
Hollande has said he understood voters who wanted to
express their frustration at a stagnant economy and unemployment running at a
12-year high.
The president on Wednesday ruled out any deal with
Le Pen which would give the far-right positions in the cabinet or help them win
parliamentary seats in June's legislative elections.
But Sarkozy has yet to say whether he would advise
supporters of his UMP party to vote Socialist rather than for the National
Front in the second round of the June legislative elections to keep the
far-right out of parliament.
"In case of a runoff between the National Front
and a Socialist, will the UMP party and the president prefer to have one of my
deputies or a Socialist deputy elected?" Le Pen said on RTL radio.
"I still don't have an answer to those
questions, I am waiting. That's a question my voters want to know about,"
she said. "How I express myself will depend on the response."
Sarkozy voters want a pact
Le Pen has said she would give her view on the
presidential second round choice at the National Front's traditional "Joan
of Arc" May Day rally, but senior aides have suggested she was highly
unlikely to endorse either candidate explicitly.
Le Pen, who took over the party founded by her
ex-paratrooper father Jean-Marie in January last year, has said she hopes to
profit from an implosion of the mainstream right.
The prospect of Hollande winning power has sent
jitters through financial markets as the 57-year-old has pledged to renegotiate
a German-inspired budget discipline pact for Europe, putting him on a collision
course with Berlin.
An opinion poll showed two-thirds of Sarkozy
supporters want him to break with past policy and strike an alliance with the
National Front after Le Pen's 17.9 per cent score on Sunday made her 6.4
million backers key to the presidential runoff.
Most polls show Hollande comfortably winning on May
6 by around 10 percentage points. He is expected to win the vast majority of
far-left votes and much of the centrist support.
Sarkozy needs about 80 per cent of Le Pen voters
behind him to avoid defeat, according to analyst estimates and a Reuters
calculator.
But surveys conducted during or after Sunday's
first-round presidential vote found that between only 44 per cent and 60 per
cent of Le Pen voters plan to switch to Sarkozy in round two, down from about
70 per cent in 2007.
In a setback to Sarkozy, centrist Francois Bayrou,
who came fifth with 9.1 per cent of the vote, accused the president of being
"absurd and offensive" in comparing his voters with those of Le Pen.
In an open letter to both candidates on Wednesday,
he called for more civil, clean and moderate politics, appearing to lean
towards Hollande without explicitly endorsing him.
Hollande said Bayrou was implicitly criticising the
president's courting of the far right. "Nicolas Sarkozy has broken the
rules," he told France Info radio. "He has understood that Sarkozy
has raced to catch votes since the first round."
A big vote for Sarkozy by National Front supporters
would make it mathmetically possible for him to win a fresh five-year term.
Its strong showing on Sunday has also given the
National Front faith it can win seats in parliament for the first time since
1986, when a brief experiment with proportional representation gave it 35
deputies.
Based on Sunday's results, the party could reach the
second round in up to 345 of the 577 constituencies in the parliamentary
election, splitting the right-wing vote.
Several of Sarkozy's top cabinet members and
advisers have ruled out any alliance with the National Front, although they do
not rule out the possibility of the UMP letting the party fight solely against
the Socialist party in certain constituencies.
Reuters
Business & Investment Opportunities
YourVietnamExpert is a division of Saigon Business Corporation Pte Ltd, Incorporated in Singapore since 1994. As Your Business Companion, we propose a range of services in Strategy, Investment and Management, focusing Healthcare and Life Science with expertise in ASEAN. We also propose Higher Education, as a bridge between educational structures and industries, by supporting international programmes. Many thanks for visiting www.yourvietnamexpert.com and/or contacting us at contact@yourvietnamexpert.com
Dear
Reader,
May I
invite you to visit our new blog: IIMS-Asean http://iims-asean.blogspot.com/
News
and activities of the International Institute of Medicine and Science Asean
Chapter of IIMS, Inc. California, USA - Health care, Life Science, Education,
Research, Philanthropy. Asean is the economic organisation of ten countries
located in South East Asia: Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR,
Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. IIMS is a
non-profit organization.
No comments:
Post a Comment