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Thursday March 28, 2024

Le Pen plays green card

By our correspondents
May 01, 2017

With a week to go before France’s presidential election runoff, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen played the green card outside a controversial aluminium plant in the south of the country.

Le Pen has made a series of targeted campaign stops in a bid to close a 19-point gap in voter surveys with centrist frontrunner Emmanuel Macron, 39.

Vowing to pursue a vision of "true ecology", the 48-year-old National Front (FN) candidate said the Alteo plant in the town of Gardanne was a symbol of a false choice between jobs and the environment.

The plant, with a workforce of some 400 as well as around 300 sub-contractors, is controversial for dumping toxic waste known as "red mud" into a Mediterranean nature reserve for decades.

Last year the government of former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls gave it an additional six years to comply with EU norms, prompting the European Commission to request an explanation.

The plant "is a symbol because they want us to believe that the choice is between jobs and health and the environment," Le Pen told a handful of reporters outside the plant during her previously unannounced stop.

"I’m here to say that... there would not be such a choice to make" under a Le Pen presidency, said the candidate, who blames environmental degradation -- and many other woes -- on "unbridled globalisation".

As part of her efforts to expand her base, Le Pen said on Saturday she would name a fellow eurosceptic from outside the FN, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, as prime minister if she is elected. Le Pen, who has promised France a referendum on quitting the European Union, said she and Dupont-Aignan, 56, would "build a national unity government that will bring together people chosen for their skills and their love of France."

Like Le Pen, Dupont-Aignan -- who lost in the election’s first round with 4.7 percent of the vote -- has said he favours ditching the euro. His backing for Le Pen "in the name of patriotism" sparked the resignation of two officials of his nationalist Debout la France (France Stand Up) party and drew more than 200 protesters to the town hall in Yerres, in the Paris region, where he is mayor.

On Saturday, Macron scoffed at the alliance as a "political scam that aims to solve Marine Le Pen’s credibility problems."

Later Sunday, Le Pen laid a wreath at a monument in the port of Marseille, south of Gardanne, to mark France’s national day of remembrance for the victims of the deportation of French Jews to Nazi Germany.