Macron zeroes in on Le Pen’s Putin links

Bloomberg

French President Emmanuel Macron ramped up his campaign for a second term, with his allies zeroing in on rival candidate Marine Le Pen’s links to Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
As the second round of campaigning began on Monday ahead of a final vote in two weeks’ time, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said voters have a choice between an “ally of Vladimir Putin” and a president who had put France at the forefront of Europe.
“Another battle is commencing with two visions of France,” he told RTL radio on Monday. He said a Le Pen victory would see France turn its back on its European Union partners and leave working people poorer.
The nationalist leader finished four percentage points behind Macron in the first round of the French election and the two will face each other in a runoff vote on April 24. and she’s already added more than 10 points to her showing in the 2017 election.
Macron and his allies are dialing up the rhetoric at the start of a potentially volatile sprint to stop Le Pen, 53, from taking control of Europe’s second-largest economy in the middle of Putin’s war against Ukraine. Le Pen has dropped her calls for France to leave the euro but has opposed Macron’s plans for more EU integration and his efforts to make France more attractive to investors.
A Le Pen victory in France would be a shock for the EU to compare with Donald Trump’s US election win of 2016. French 10-year yields held near a seven-year high seen last week, when investors were spooked by polls showing a narrower lead for Macron over Le Pen.
“A Macron victory would be welcomed by the markets as markets would price
in diminishing political
uncertainty and continued business-friendly administration,” Lale Akoner, a senior market strategist at BNY Mellon Investment Management said in an email. “In contrast a Le Pen victory would mean heightened political uncertainty and instability which would lead to broad market sell-off.”
So far, Le Pen’s past connections to Putin haven’t had an impact on the election. She secured a loan for her party from a Russian company in 2014 and visited the Russian president in Moscow in 2017 — photos of the encounter re-surfaced recently. Le Pen distanced herself from Putin after his invasion of Ukraine but some people close to her have continued to express sympathy. For his part, Macron has been speaking to Putin regularly to try to end the crisis, and rivals have accused him of being naive in his interactions with the Russian leader.
Throughout his presidency, Macron has struggled to shift perceptions that he is arrogant and aloof, which helped Le Pen to frame him as “the president of the rich.”