France’s far-right National Assembly (Rassemblement National/RN) Marine Le Pen on Sunday launched the party’s campaign for June’s European Parliament elections, saying the vote would constitute a referendum on immigration, Reuters reported. Agerpres.

Opinion polls show that the RN is on the verge of a significant electoral success, with some polls giving the party 28%-30% support, and could pose a serious challenge to France’s main parties, including the Renaissance) of President Emmanuel Macron.

“It is very clear that this June 9 election is a referendum against flooding us with migrants,” RN president Jordan Bardella, 28, who is leading the RN list in the summer election, said at the party’s first campaign rally in the port city of Marseille. in the south of the country.

“It is the duty of the French to decide who is allowed to enter the country and who is not. Together with us, France will protect its borders,” he told the crowd.

Bardella gave the closing speech of the rally in front of a giant poster with the campaign slogan “France is back, Europe is back to life!”, while his supporters waved French flags and chanted “We shall win!”. and “We are at home!”.

As elsewhere in Europe, the far-right in France has taken advantage of the crisis in the cost of living, rising migrant numbers, growing farmer discontent over bureaucracy and high costs, and general resentment among the political elite.

According to the statistics office INSEE, the number of immigrants – people living in France but born abroad – was 5% in 1946, reached 7.4% in 1975, 8.5% in 2010 and just over 10% in in 2022. About a third became French.

Bardella and Marine Le Pen, the de facto leader of the French far-right, who gave the opening speech, attacked Emmanuel Macron during the rally.

Le Pen said Macron, who was recently met with hostility by farmers at an exhibition in Paris, was a president “under siege”.

She also criticized Macron’s recent comments that sending European troops to Ukraine could not be ruled out, saying Macron “thinks he can find political salvation in the warrior posture that stunned the French”.