The attack came just two days before France goes to the polls to elect its president.
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President Donald Trump responded to reports of a shooting Thursday in Paris by saying it looked like a terrorist attack.
This is what many political observers have been dreading.
Le Pen, a 48-year-old mother of three, has distanced herself from her father, National Front party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has been convicted of crimes related to anti-Semitism and mocked the Holocaust as a “detail” of history.
She proposes more police officers, more prisons. She wants to deport any criminal who is not a French citizen. Those two will compete in a runoff vote on Sunday, May 7 and the victor will become France’s next president. “You can’t provide complete protection”, he said. The security of the public “is my main mission”.
Going into the first round of France’s presidential election moves in the euro will probably be limited to position adjustment, said Masafumi Yamamoto, chief currency strategist for Mizuho Securities in Tokyo.
Both have sought to capitalise on the terror attack, which follows a series of Isis-linked massacres that have left more than 230 people dead in France since 2015.
France has seen the rise of populism in recent years.
The race is quite open with no less than four candidates vying for the two seats in the second round.
But the shake-up in US politics represented by Trump is seen as encouraging by Le Pen.
Francois Fillon, the Republican candidate who should have had the election in the bag if it weren’t for a nagging corruption scandal, has mainly focused on economic issues.
In another scenario, Le Pen gains from Fillon and Fillon gains from Macron. Mélenchon and Le Pen have said they would consider a “Brexit”-like departure from the EU”.
He is leading most opinion polls for the election’s first round on Sunday, which will select the two candidates to contest the second-round run-off on May 7, which is expected to pit him against Le Pen.
This year’s Le Pen campaign logos simply say “Marine”.
Le Pen’s popularity has dropped lately.
Following the shooting, Le Pen said she didn’t want the French people to become accustomed to Islamist terrorism.
The implosion of the ruling Socialist Party, with outgoing President Francois Hollande too unpopular to run again, and the stunning success of his former Economy Minister, Emmanuel Macron, with an upstart middle-way grassroots campaign without major party backing, threatened to dismantle postwar France’s traditional left-right political divide.
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Security fears had already re-emerged in the run-up to a first ballot after an attack thought to have been targeted at some of the candidates was foiled earlier in the week.
