WASHINGTON
DC — With the stakes high in
France’s second-round
presidential election, many French citizens in the US and Canada trooped to
polling places Saturday to cast their ballots, a day before their fellow
citizens back home.
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Centrist incumbent
Emmanuel Macron and his
extreme-right challenger Marine Le Pen have waged a bitter campaign, and
Sunday’s result is expected to be far closer than when the two faced off five
years ago.
More than 130,000 French expatriates are registered
to vote in the US and just over 100,000 in Canada.
In the first round, only 30 percent of eligible
voters in the Washington voting district — which also takes in five nearby
states — cast ballots.
Christine Polillo, 65, did not take part two weeks
ago, like many people questioned by AFP outside the French embassy in
Washington.
Polillo, a teacher who has lived in
Baltimore,
Maryland for 35 years, said it was difficult from afar to know the stances of
the large number of first-round candidates.
But voting in the conclusive second round, she
added, is “very important — a way of feeling attached to France.”
Added Rachida Boukezia, a 42-year-old
IMF economist:
“We are concerned,” even if France is far away.
“I would like their future to be in good hands,” she
said of her two young daughters.
In the first round, French voters in the US favored
Macron by huge margins over Le Pen, sometimes outpolling her by 20 to one or
more.
In Montreal Saturday, a long line wound around the
convention center as people waited — often with a coffee in one hand and a book
or smartphone in the other — to vote.
Claire Barsaq, 33, has lived in Montreal for 12
years. Her nursing job caused her to miss the election’s first round.
But “I did not want to miss the second round,” she
told AFP. “The choice is too important.”
More than 67,000 French nationals are registered to
vote in Montreal. In the first round they favored far-left candidate Jean-Luc
Melenchon.
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