French President Emmanuel Macron visited a multicultural, working-class suburb north of Paris on Thursday to woo leftist voters ahead of Sunday’s presidential runoff vote against far-right challenger Marine Le Pen.
Reflecting the vote’s wide international influence, Macron received support Thursday from the center-left leaders of Germany, Spain and Portugal, who urged French voters to choose him over the nationalist Le Pen.
Their appeals came only a day after imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny also spoke up about the French vote, alleging that Le Pen is too closely linked to Russian authorities to become France’s next president amid Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Macron, who led the first round of voting on April 10 that eliminated 10 other candidates, said he was taking nothing for granted and was seeking broader support.
He said he chose to make one of his last campaign stops in a place that “is facing many difficulties” in the poorest region of mainland France, the Seine-Saint-Denis, where many residents are immigrants or have immigrant roots.
His visit came after the two rivals clashed bitterly in a televised debate Wednesday, with Macron saying that Le Pen’s plan to ban Muslim women in France from wearing headscarves in public would trigger “civil war” in the country, which has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe.
Le Pen, meanwhile, was speaking with voters in northern France ahead of her final rally Thursday evening in the town of Arras.
Macron did not have an easy task in Saint-Denis, where an overwhelming majority of voters had supported far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who came in third in the first round of voting and did not make the runoff.
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