Dupont-Aignan, Le Pen Alliance Threatens Hegemony of Mainstream Parties - MP

The potential right-wing alliance between France Arise party leader Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and presidential candidate Marine Le Pen will end the monopoly that The Republicans and the Socialist Party have had in French political life for decades, Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a member of the EU Parliament's Europe of Nations and Freedom Group, told Sputnik.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Last week, Le Pen, a former leader of the National Front (FN) party, announced she would make ex-presidential hopeful Dupont-Aignan her prime minister should she win the presidency. Dupont-Aignan, who won 4.7 percent of the vote in the first round of election, said that under the governance deal with Le Pen, his policy proposals would be incorporated in her campaign.

"The absence of an alliance with the patriots was one of the survival conditions of the UMPS [The Republicans and the Socialist Party]. The extraordinarily courageous act of Nicolas Dupont-Aignan opens a breach, which will be central to the ongoing reconstruction of political life," Schaffhauser said.

He added that in the long-term the alliance would result in the emergence of a patriotic movement amid France's transforming political landscape, as the 2017 French presidential election is the first in the history of the Fifth Republic in which The Republicans and the Socialist Party have been sidelined by other political forces.

On April 23, independent centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron and Le Pen emerged as the two top contenders in the first round of the election, and they are set to face each other in the run-off on Sunday. According to a recent Elabe poll, Macron is projected to receive 62 percent of the vote against Le Pen's 38 percent.