PARIS — The only face-to-face televised debate between France’s presidential candidates turned into an uncivil, no-holds-barred head-on clash of styles, politics and personalities Wednesday.
Emmanuel Macron called his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen a “parasite” who would lead the country into civil war. She painted the former banker as a lackey of big business who is soft on Islamic extremism.
Neither landed a knockout blow in the 2½-hour prime-time slugfest — but not for lack of trying. The tone was ill-tempered from the get-go, with no common ground or love lost between the two candidates and their polar opposite plans and visions for France. Both sought to destabilize each other and neither really succeeded.
For the large cohort of voters who remain undecided, the debate at least had the merit of making abundantly clear the stark choice facing them at the ballot box Sunday.
Neither candidate announced major shifts in their policy platforms. They instead spent much of their monitored allotments of time attacking each other — often personally.
Le Pen’s choicest barb came as she argued that Macron, if elected, would be in the pocket of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Either way France will be led by a woman; either me or Madame Merkel,” she said derisively.
Macron gave as good as he got and, at times, got the upper hand with his pithy slights. In the closing minutes, he used a sharp-tongued monologue to target one of Le Pen’s biggest vulnerabilities: her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme-right former presidential candidate repeatedly convicted for hate speech and who founded her party, the National Front.
Throughout, Macron portrayed Marine Le Pen as an empty shell, shaky on details and facts, seeking to profit politically by stirring up hatred and the anger of French voters — a dominant theme of the campaign — without feasible proposals. He called her “the high priestess of fear.”