Anne Hidalgo says Paris ‘stands up for freedom’ amid Marine Le Pen success in first round of voting
The Paris mayor has sought to reassure visitors that the festive mood at the Olympics will not be dampened by Marine Le Pen’s electoral successes in France’s snap parliamentary elections, with less than a month to go before the city hosts the Games.
“The party will not be spoilt,” Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo told broadcaster France 2 on Tuesday. “I say to visitors from the world over – come over! Because Paris is a city that stands up for freedom and is a city of resistance against the extreme right.”
Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigrant National Rally (RN) and its allies finished first with 33% of the vote in Sunday’s first round.
Before the second, decisive round on 7 July, more than 160 candidates have withdrawn in an effort to build a united front capable of halting Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s 28-year-old protege with no governing experience, from becoming prime minister.
Le Pen on Tuesday said her party would seek to form a government, cobbling support from a minimum of “for example, 270 deputies” and then find support from 19 more MPs in order to make Bardella prime minister.
“If we then have a majority, then yes, of course, we’ll go and do what the voters elected us to do,” she told broadcaster France Inter.
The party’s worst results, however, were in Paris, where all of the party’s candidates were eliminated in the first round. Instead Parisians cast their votes for the leftwing New Popular Front alliance (NFP), which nationally earned 28% of the vote and Emmanuel Macron’s broad alliance of centrists, who gained 22% of the vote across the country.
