PARIS: The two candidates vying to become France’s next president attended a sombre ceremony Tuesday honouring the policeman killed on the Champs Elysees, as they ramp up a campaign marked by security jitters.
Centrist politician Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen stood grim-faced among hundreds of mourners as Xavier Jugele’s partner delivered a moving eulogy to the 37-year-old officer slain in the shooting claimed by the IS group on the most famous street in Paris just days before the first round of the election.
“I suffer without hatred,” Etienne Cardiles said at the ceremony led by outgoing President Francois Hollande in the elegant courtyard of the Paris police headquarters.
Cardiles was echoing the sentiment of the husband of a victim of the November 2015 attack on Paris’s Bataclan concert hall who said to the perpetrators: “You won’t have my hatred.”
Jugele had been among the first responders at the Bataclan massacre that claimed 90 lives, and made a point of attending the Sting concert there a year after the bloodbath.
Karim Cheurfi, a 39-year-old Frenchman, shot Jugele and wounded two others in Thursday’s attack before being killed in return fire.
Hollande on Tuesday posthumously made Jugele a knight of the Legion d’Honneur, one of France’s highest honours.
Macron and Le Pen — who are going head-to-head in the election run-off on May 7 — differ starkly on how to protect France, still reeling from a series of attacks since 2015 that has claimed more than 230 lives.
Le Pen has called for France to take back control of its borders from the European Union and deport all foreigners on a terror watchlist, accusing Macron of being soft on terrorism.
Macron, who at 39 is favourite to become France’s youngest-ever president, has urged voters not to “give in to fear” and vowed to step up security cooperation with EU partners.
Polls suggest that Macron, who won Sunday’s first round with 24 per cent of the vote, will comfortably triumph in the run-off.
But after the political shocks of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s unlikely rise to the White House, analysts say a late surge by Le Pen is still possible.
France’s political establishment has rallied around Macron in a bid to shut out the far right, with Hollande on Monday urging voters to turn out for the pro-EU former banker.
Thanking Hollande in a tweet, Macron appealed to the French to “remain true to France’s values” in the final round. — AFP
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