French presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen have attacked each other at the start of their run-off campaigns, after coming first and second respectively in the initial vote.
With just under two weeks to go until the final round, each politician wasted no time in casting aspersions against their rival.
“Emmanuel Macron, if by some mischance he was re-elected, would feel totally free to continue his policy of social wreckage,” Ms Le Pen claimed, before turning to the cost-of-living crisis, her usual political line of attack.
For his part, Mr Macron accused the leader of the far-right National Rally party of being a “demagogue”, who told people what they wished to hear.
Responding to the first round results, Gérard Araud, a former French diplomat who is now a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, said his country’s political life was now “more than ever a field of ruins”.
“Macron is leading a centrist block of nearly 30 percent, but his only credible adversaries are extremists,” Gérard Araud explained.
