Marine Le Pen on immigration

French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who has dominated the campaign with her anti-immigration, anti-EU proposals, is appealing to her electoral base in hopes of maintaining a shot at the runoff.

Opinion polls predict the two will reach the second round on 7 May.

When margins of error are factored in, the polls suggest all four candidates have the potential to make it to the second round of the election.

Mélenchon, a former Socialist minister and radical Eurosceptic, spent five cheery hours on Monday chugging across the capital from north to south on a canal barge, stopping off at several spots along the way to greet supporters and ending up at the national library.

French voters go to the polls on Sunday for the first round of their most unpredictable presidential election in living memory.

Ms Le Pen has spent years trying to broaden support for the party founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen but she appears to have suspended that approach in the final days of rallying before Sunday’s first round of voting.

Le Pen wants to pull France out of the euro, close the borders to immigrants and enact a program of “economic patriotism” that includes a hefty tax on foreign products and workers.

Opponents of Le Pen and her anti-immigration National Front party also skirmished with police outside a Paris rally this week.

Fillon attacked Macron and Melenchon for making vague promises as he tried to continue his recovery after criminal charges sideswiped his campaign last month.

“People believe the old images, the old clichés that are being promoted by the other parties”, he said.

Macron has 24 percent of the poll respondents, with Le Pen at 23 percent, Fillon with 19.5 percent and Melenchon with 18 percent, a survey for the French television news channel BFMTV indicates.

Promising to immediately impose a moratorium on immigration, she said: “The French sometimes have fewer rights than foreigners – even illegal ones”. “We didn’t realize how fragile Europe really was”.

Melenchon, who leads a far-left alliance that includes the Communist Party, has risen in polls in recent weeks and is now considered as having a chance of reaching the runoff election.

She is popular with young people in France, as is her slightly more socially conservative niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.

Conservative candidate Francois Fillon took his tough-on-security campaign to the southern French city of Nice, which was scarred by a deadly truck attack a year ago that killed 86 people.

LONDON – British voters will be heading to polling stations for the third time since 2015, after lawmakers overwhelmingly backed Prime Minister Theresa May’s call for a snap election on June 8.

The Paris prosecutor said on Tuesday that a video linked to the two Frenchmen and intercepted in early April had featured a machine gun placed on a table as well as a newspaper which had one of the presidential candidates on the front page.

While Macron vs Le Pen remains most the likely second-round scenario, for the investment community, a positive surprise could be an outcome that pits Macron against Fillon, while a negative one would be Le Pen versus Melenchon.

The EU executive was referring to Le Pen’s demand on Tuesday night that French TV station remove the blue, yellow-starred EU flag from the stage where she would be interviewed, leaving just the French blue-white-and-red flag.