EDITOR's NOTES: Will fighting terror and guaranteeing security be the decisive elements for French voters on Sunday?
Three days before French voters go to polls to elect a new President, terror and security took again the center stage of the election campaign after a shooting on the iconic Champs-Elysées Boulevard in Paris in which one policeman was killed and two others seriously wounded. The shooting took place as the presidential candidates appeared on television to present their respective programmes. A terror attack claimed by the Islamic State.
Voters will cast ballots in the first round on Sunday of what appears to be the most unpredictable election in France in memory as the gap between four frontrunners narrows. The two candidates who get the most votes will then face off in a run-off election on 7 May.
Latest polls show that centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron and extreme-right leader Marine Le Pen still front-runners followed by conservative Francois Fillon and extreme-leftist Jean-Luc Melanchon. Macron, a former banker who quit as economy minister last year to set up his independent movement would beat Le Pen or any other candidate in the run-off, the polls also show.
Three of the 11 presidential candidates, Le Pen, Macron, Fillon, have decided to halt campaigning after the shooting.
“In this current context, there are no grounds to continue campaigning. We must first show our solidarity with the police,” Fillon told French tv.
Fillon, from the center-right ‘’Les Republicains’’ party, who has sought to reinforce his credentials as a hard-liner on security, declared that fighting “Islamist totalitarianism” must be the priority for the next president, a theme that Marine Le Pen has been developing since the beginning of the campaign by linking security concerns to Muslim immigration.
French Jewish vote, who represent 1% of voters, is traditionally divided between the center-right and the Socialist party. But according to several specialists, this time it will be spread between Francois Fillon (a former Prime Minister to former President Nicolas Sarkozy), Emmanuel Macron (who is close to former Prime Minister Manuel Valls who is very pro-Israel) and, to a lesser extent, Benoit Hamon (of the Socialist party) and Marine Le Pen’s National Front who attracts Jewish voters because of her positions on radical Islam and immigration and despite the fact that she made controversial statements on wearing the kippah and dual citizenship for French Israelis and that many in her party still express the racist and anti-Semitic ideas of her Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Macron is expected to draw support from Jews who normally vote for the Socialist party but are turned off by Hamon’s pro-Palestinian positions, but also from centre-right voters.
The fourth frontrunner, extreme-lefirst Jean-Luc Melanchon is very anti-Zionist and pro-BDS.
Shimon Samuels, director for international relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris says France is experiencing a similar polarization phenomenon as in the United States. “Opinion in general is polarized, there is no center any longer and Jewish opinion is also polarized. And as such, you have different approaches to the same questions, with a great deal of uncertainty.”