Sawt Falasteen - French parties in final push for votes ahead of crunch poll

The official campaigning period will end at midnight followed by a day off on Saturday, during which political activity is forbidden ahead of voting Sunday. Another week of campaigning will then lead up to the decisive second round on July 7.

The far-right National Rally (RN) is tipped to win the election, potentially giving the party the post of prime minister for the first time in its history in a tense "cohabitation" with centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

Opinion polls suggest his centrist alliance will come only third behind the RN and a broad but fragile left-wing coalition, the New Popular Front (NFP).

The RN party chief, Jordan Bardella, 28, would have a chance to lead a government as prime minister.

But he has insisted he would do so only if his party wins an absolute majority of the 577 seats in the National Assembly after the second round.

Friends and foes of Macron alike are still scratching their heads over why the president dissolved the lower house of parliament and called new elections in the aftermath of his party's heavy defeat in this month's EU Parliament vote.

- 'Serious message' -

The RN's three-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen had ratcheted up tensions ahead of the polls by telling the regional Telegramme daily that the president's title as commander in chief of the armed forces was "honorific, because it's the prime minister who holds the purse strings".

In a televised debate late Thursday, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said that Le Pen had sent a "clear message" by indicating that if the RN wins the election "there will be a kind of dispute between the prime minister and president over who is commander-in-chief of the army".

"It is a very serious message for the security of France," he said.

But Bardella said in the debate he would "not let Russian imperialism absorb an allied state like Ukraine".

He said he was also opposed to sending longer range missiles to Ukraine that could hit Russian territory "and place France and the French in a situation of co-belligerence".

"My compass is the interest of France and the French," said Bardella.

Macron has insisted he will serve out the remainder of his second term until it expires in 2027, no matter which party emerges on top in the coming legislative contest.

Le Pen, whom opponents have long accused of having too cosy a relationship with the Kremlin, scents that this could be her best-ever chance to win the Elysee Palace after three previous attempts.

- 'Real fear' -

When he called the snap vote after a June 9 European Parliament election drubbing by the RN, Macron had hoped to present voters with a stark choice about whether to hand France to the far right.

An Ipsos poll published in Le Monde predicted the RN would win 36 percent of the vote, the NFP 29 percent and Macron's alliance just 19.5 percent.

"It (the RN) can not only envisage a relative majority, but we cannot exclude, far from it, an absolute majority," Brice Teinturier, deputy director of Ipsos, told AFP.

The televised debate, where Attal and Bardella were joined by Socialist leader Olivier Faure, was equally ill-tempered as the first such session on Tuesday.

"Whenever you are in difficulty you change the subject," Attal told Bardella. "He is tense this evening, is Mr Attal," said Bardella.

Attal charged that 100 RN candidates standing in the election had made "racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic comments."

"Everything is false, utterly false," responded Bardella, who also defended a controversial proposal to bar dual nationals from sensitive state posts.

Underscoring the stakes felt by many in France from ethnic minority backgrounds, French basketball superstar Victor Wembanyama said "for me it is important to take a distance from extremes, which are not the direction to take for a country like ours".

Acclaimed black French filmmaker Alice Diop meanwhile told the Liberation newspaper that having the far right in government would be "not only a moral discomfort but a real fear".

D.Khalil--SF-PST