PARIS _ The far-right National Front attacked presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron as a "candidate of oligarchs" and banking lobbies, who parties with show-business celebrities, as it sought to portray Marine Le Pen as more in touch with the French people.
The morning after the election-night parties, the National Front was eager to underscore the differences between long-time opposition politician Le Pen and political newcomer Macron, a former investment banker and economy minister. Macron had 23.8 percent in the first round and Le Pen had 21.5 percent, according to results from the Interior Ministry with 97.4 percent of votes counted.
"We are in almost perfect opposition on all points," Florian Philippot, the party's vice-president, told France 2 television on Monday.
With both establishment parties knocked out of the race after Sunday's first round, anti-euro Le Pen and independent Macron have two weeks to secure a majority in the May 7 runoff. The next round will present their starkly different visions, with Macron representing a France that has thrived on its openness to the world and Le Pen speaking for those who have been hurt by it.
"Macron's biggest weaknesses are his lack of experience and that for many voters he is the candidate of the France which succeeds, for whom globalization has worked," said Yves-Marie Cann, a pollster at Elabe. "So he is not necessarily the one who can defend working-class and other people who have been hit by globalization."
Philippot compared a dinner Macron had at La Rotonde restaurant, in the former bohemian district of Montparnasse, on Sunday evening with the election night party ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy held at a chic venue on the Champs-Elysees in 2007, which earned him a "bling-bling president" label.
"Macron was there with all his showbiz friends," Philippot said. "He is way too arrogant and sure of himself." The independent candidate's speech on Sunday night was "as if his media and banking lobbies have already decided the election," the National Front official added in a separate interview on RMC radio.
Philippot urged supporters of Communist-backed Jean-Luc Melenchon, who ranked fourth, to rally behind Le Pen: "Do you think they want a total deregulation of the economy? Do you think they want to go any further in this banking and financial European Union?"
Other National Front members were also quick to attack Macron, who has been the most pro-EU candidate in the race.
"Macron's tactic is to recycle all the same people that have betrayed France for the past decades," Sebastien Chenus, a party member, said on BFM TV. "We'll see the truth in this second round."
The rejection of the two main parties by French voters reflected the anger coursing through a society traumatized by Islamic terrorism and buffeted by years of sub-par economic growth and high unemployment.
First-round failures must now flag to their supporters who _ if any of the two _ they will rally behind. The Republicans of third-placed Francois Fillon and the Socialist Party leaders behind fifth-placed Benoit Hamon were meeting on Monday after both candidates quickly endorsed Macron the previous evening. Melenchon has yet to endorse a second-round candidate.
On the first day of campaigning for the decisive round, Le Pen was quicker off the mark. She was due to go back on the campaign trail with a tour of a market. Macron's team had yet to announce his plans for the day.
Meanwhile, Le Pen faces a struggle to keep her own party in line, with internal dissent over her opposition to the euro _ more than two-thirds of voters want to keep the single currency _ and the strategy she should adopt for the run-off.
"For Marine Le Pen, the mistake would be to try to seduce both Fillon's voters and those of Melenchon," Jean-Francois Touze, a former close ally of Le Pen's father Jean-Marie, said in a post on Twitter. "The only winning strategy is to stick to the right."
