European leaders back Macron as French campaign nears end

Get Nadine White's Race Report newsletter for a fresh perspective on the week's news Get our free newsletter from The Independent's Race Correspondent Get our free newsletter from The Independent's Race Correspondent SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Just days before France's crucial presidential runoff vote, the center-left leaders of Germany, Spain and Portugal urged French voters Thursday to choose centrist President Emmanuel Macron over far-right nationalist rival Marine Le Pen. And in another sign of the wide international influence the result of Sunday's French presidential vote will have, imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny also spoke up a day earlier, urging French voters to back Macron and alleging that Le Pen is too closely linked to Russian authorities. In a column published Thursday in several European newspapers, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa wrote that Sunday’s vote is “critical for France and all and every one of us in Europe.” “It’s the election between a democratic candidate who believes that France’s strength broadens in a powerful and autonomous European Union and an extreme-right candidate who openly sides with those who attack our freedom and democracy, values based on the French ideas of Enlightenment,” the joint comment said without mentioning Macron or Le Pen by name. Social Democrat Scholz and Socialists Sánchez and Costa wrote that Europe “is facing a change of era” due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and that “populists and the extreme right” are viewing Putin “as an ideological and political model, replicating his chauvinist ideas.” “They have echoed his attacks on minorities and diversity and his goal of nationalist uniformity,” they said, according to the article in Spain’s leading newspaper El País.