Le Pen courts left-wing voters in video call

Marine Le Pen, a frontrunner in the French presidency race, on Friday called on hard-left voters to block centrist rival Emmanuel Macron.

"I address the voters of France Unbowed to tell them that today we have to block Emmanuel Macron," she said in a video message.

"Mr. Macron is a banker. He represents the arrogant finance that (outgoing president) Francois Hollande had promised to fight and that he finally allowed to flourish," she added.

In a bid to appease radical and anti-capitalist voters to rally a large majority, the candidate of the National Front party (FN) stressed "the whole oligarchy which uses against me, but also against you, unworthy arguments and wants to put you behind the banker Macron, I know that you are stronger than that. Let's turn the page."

Ranked fourth in the election's first round, Jean-Luc Melenchon won 19.58 percent of the vote. He replied in a video that he would not be endorsing any candidate.

"I will go and vote. What I'm going to vote I'm not going to say. But, there's no need to be a great clerk to guess what I'm going to do...I will not vote FN, everyone knows that," Melenchon said.

During the campaign, he was a harsh critics of Macron's liberal economic project and Le Pen's anti-immigration policy. However, he proposed a similar protectionist approach involving an exit form the eurozone.

A new Odoxa survey released earlier on Friday, showed 40 percent of Melenchon's supporters would vote for the former economy minister, down by 7 points from last week's survey. 19 percent of them said to support Le Pen, up by 8 points from last week's poll.

More than 40 percent of hard left voters said to abstain, according to the poll. Endit