A recent poll showed the French centrist and hard-right chief Marine Le Pen would run neck-and-neck in the first round of the 2022 election if the voting took place today. “Mrs Le Pen won 34 percent of the final vote in the 2017 election, but polls show she would now win 45 percent. She’s gained 11 points in two years of Macronism. So with a little more effort, Mr Macron will pave the way for a Le Pen victory,” Mr Montebourg told the French news channel BFMTV.
“Mr Macron isn’t a rampart against the RN – he’s a propeller for the RN,” he continued.
The 41-year-old centrist needs to “change policy,” Mr Montebourg added: “The French want France to assert itself. And if we don’t create the conditions for this assertion soon, I fear the worst is yet to come.”
Recent polls show Mrs Le Pen’s popularity is rising with voters while Mr Macron’s is slipping.
He and Mrs Le Pen would run neck-and-neck in the first round of a presidential election if the voting took place today, an Ifop poll for Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper found.
Mrs Le Pen would garner 28 percent of the first-round vote, while Mr Macron would garner 27 percent. But the incumbent would once again trounce Mrs Le Pen in the second and final round with 55 percent of the vote.
Opinion polls show voters are increasingly worried about immigration, driving support for Mrs Le Pen’s populist RN.
As such, Mr Macron has signalled a tougher line on immigration, insisting that the government must end its “lax” approach to prevent voters from drifting to the far right.
Eager to show voters it is heeding their concerns, the government pledged last week to clear out some migrant camps, impose quotas for migrant workers and deny newly-arrived asylum seekers access to non-urgent healthcare.
“We want to take back control of our migration policy,” Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said as he unveiled 20 new measures on immigration he said were the mark of a “France that is open but not naïve”.
“That means when we say yes it really means yes, and when we say no it really means no. I think we have found the right balance between reassuring our citizens and not giving ground to populism,” he continued.
Mrs Le Pen, for her part, slammed the new measures as an “electoral move”.
Mr Macron’s centrist administration has so far refused to cave in to pressure from conservative rivals on immigration, in part because many of the president’s liberal allies are firmly opposed to implementing measures championed by the anti-immigrant right.
But in tightening the screws on immigration, France joins other European states, including Italy, Britain and Sweden, that have opted to take a tougher approach since the peaks in migration flows in 2015 and 2016 triggered an EU-wide crisis and fuelled right-wing populist movements.
France last year received a record 122,743 asylum requests, up 22 percent compared to 2017.
The Ifop poll of 1,396 people aged 18 and over was carried out online between October 29-30.