Marine Le Pen Says She’ll Work With Macron in Appeal to French Moderates

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(Bloomberg) — Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said she will not try to oust President Emmanuel Macron if she wins France's early parliamentary elections, in an appearance to moderates and investors.

“I respect institutions, I do not call for institutional chaos,” Le Pen told Le Figaro newspaper. “There will simply be coexistence.”

Le Pen is reaching out to mainstream voters as she seeks to consolidate her majority in the next parliament, an outcome that would constitute an earthquake in European politics. Her group, the National Rally, is already on track to become the largest party in the House of Representatives, a prospect that has alarmed investors, France's international partners and a section of the French public.

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Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets across France on Saturday to oppose Le Pen's position on human rights, the environment and the economy. Financial markets have also fallen since Macron dissolved the National Assembly a week ago, with about $210 billion erased from the value of French stocks.

“Chaos is him,” she told Le Figaro. “Social chaos, chaos with security issues, chaos with immigration, and now institutional chaos.”

The National Rally party is on track to win 35% of the votes in the first round scheduled for June 30, according to an opinion poll conducted by the Ifop Institute and published on Sunday in Le Journal du Dimanche. The leftist Popular Front comes in second place with 26%, while Macron's Ennahda Party comes in third with 19%. These expectations are largely consistent with a previous poll conducted on Monday and Tuesday.

Le Pen said that if she could form a majority — either with National Rally lawmakers alone or with their allies — she would lead her group's parliamentary bloc and the party's 28-year-old leader, Jordan Bardella, would become prime minister. The elections will conclude in two rounds on July 7.

Beyond the general sense of unease surrounding the politician who once supported Vladimir Putin and campaigned for France to leave the euro, investors' concerns about Le Pen focus on three areas: Ukraine, the European Union and, most important of all, the budget.

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France's constitutional structure means that sometimes the presidency and legislature can be controlled by different parties, although this happens less frequently than in the United States. The last time was in 1997.

In this case, the president is responsible for foreign and defense policy, but the prime minister controls domestic issues such as fiscal policy.

Even under Macron, who has made budget consolidation part of his rhetoric to voters, France has backed away from its pledge made earlier this year to reduce the budget deficit, and investors are concerned that the situation could deteriorate quickly under a populist government run by Le Pen and Bardella. .

The National Rally has not yet outlined its policy proposals in detail, but it has said it would cut sales taxes on fuel and energy at a cost of about 20 billion euros ($21 billion) and pledged to take back control of energy policy from the European Union. European Union. It also promised to lower the retirement age to 60 years and increase the wages of some government employees.

“The financial markets do not really understand the National Rally project,” Le Pen told Le Figaro newspaper. “They only heard the caricature of our project. When they read about it, they found it quite plausible.”

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Bank of France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau said on Wednesday that the next government must quickly clarify its economic policy, while Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, a close ally of Macron, warned that a Le Pen victory would spark a financial crisis in France.

Le Pen axis

Le Pen has spent years trying to improve the image of her movement, which was founded by her father, who denies the Holocaust and is anti-Semitism.

However, in the 2022 presidential election, she proposed an anti-immigration campaign that would have included expelling illegal immigrants. Bardella has portrayed immigration from Africa as a threat to French culture, and has at times supported the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that white Christian Europeans are being replaced by Muslim or non-Western immigrants.

Regarding Russia, Le Pen tried to reset her position after the war in Ukraine changed public perceptions of Putin. She praised the “heroic resistance” of the Ukrainian people, but also criticized international sanctions imposed on Russia and the National Rally party's abstention earlier this year on security guarantees for Kiev.

(Updates with latest polls in fifth paragraph)

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