PARIS, April 20 (Reuters) - Former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, a conservative Gaullist who won global celebrity by opposing U.S. plans for war in Iraq, said on Thursday he would back centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron in Sunday's presidential election.

"There is a new path, which Emmanuel Macron wants to open, and that is to unite," Villepin told Le Parisien newspaper.

He said in the face of the traditional left-right party system that was imprisoned by its own divisions and extremes that were determined to flip the table over the choice of Macron was obvious.

Villepin, prime minister between 2005-2007 under then president Jacques Chirac, is best known internationally for announcing Chirac's refusal to join a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in an impassioned speech at the United Nations in 2003 when he was foreign minister. (Reporting by John Irish; editing by Michel Rose) </s> France's ex-prime minister Dominique de Villepin, a conservative, has thrown his weight behind the centrist candidate for the presidency, Emmanuel Macron, and not fellow right winger François Fillon.

"There is a new path, which Emmanuel Macron wants to open, and that is to unite," Villepin told Le Parisien newspaper.

He said that in the face of the traditional left-right party system that was imprisoned by its own divisions and extremes, it was an obvious choice to pick Macron.

Macron, who quit the Socialist government last year to run as an independent and created the En Marche! (Forward!) movement, has drawn support from politicians on both sides of the political spectrum and is one of the favourites to win the election.

The ex-investment banker, who has never run for elected office before, has gatecrashed the leadership contest by pitching himself as the only candidate who can overhaul France’s political system and bridge the left-right political divide.

France's scandal-plagued conservative candidate Fillon, 63, has endured a wretched campaign since he was charged over accusations he gave his wife a fake job as his parliamentary aide for which she was paid hundreds of thousands of euros.

Macron is leading in most opinion polls for the election's first round and is expected to contest a second-round run-off with far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Polls show he would easily defeat her. However, this election has proven to be almost unforecastable, and lessons have been learned about relying to heavily on opinion polls after Brexit and the election of US President Donal Trump.

Macron also spoke with former US president Barack Obama on the phone on Thursday, in an apparent sign of support just three days before the first round of the election. Obama remains a very popular figure in France, and the pro-EU centrist is the only candidate to have spoken with him.

De Villepin himself became famous globally for vocally and eloquently opposing US plans for the war in Iraq in an impassioned speech at the United Nations in 2003 when he was foreign minister. Villepin was prime minister between 2005-2007 under then president Jacques Chirac. </s> Theresa May is meeting the centrist French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron in London while continuing her policy of refusing to engage with his rival Marine Le Pen of the far right Front National.

The prime minister was scheduled to host the presidential hopeful in Downing Street on Tuesday after he requested a meeting while in the UK to speak to 3,000 French voters in Westminster.



May’s spokesman said they would speak about a broad range of issues, including Brexit, and dismissed the idea that it showed favouritism towards his candidacy. 



He confirmed it was still the government’s position that it does not have relations with Le Pen, one of the three main contenders along with Macron and François Fillon, the rightwing candidate.

The move is fairly unusual but not unprecedented; Tony Blair met the French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 during his campaign.

Macron’s London trip and his rally for supporters near Westminster comes as he attempts to get his campaign back on track after a troubled week. Polls show Le Pen with an increasingly solid lead in the first round of the election, with Macron slipping back to equal standing with the beleaguered Fillon. 



Fillon has vowed to continue his campaign despite a preliminary investigation into whether he gave his wife a fake parliamentary job from public funds.

All polls currently suggest Le Pen will be defeated in the presidential second round in May. But this week an Opinionway survey for Les Echos, showed the gap was narrowing – with Macron versus Le Pen on 58% to 42%, and Fillon versus Le Pen on 56% to 44%.

Macron, who is running a delicate balancing act with a platform that is “neither left nor right”, has been accused by his opponents of fleeing serious argument about policy by failing to set out a concrete list of policy proposals or how he intends to pay for them. Later this week, he will set out how he plans to cut French public spending while also committing to boosting police numbers, prison places and teacher numbers.

On a trip to Algeria last week, Macron provoked a row after he said France’s history in the country was a “crime against humanity”. At the weekend he apologised if he had offended French nationals who had to leave Algeria in 1962 but said: “We must face this common, complex past if we want to move on and get along.”

He was also forced to clarify his position on same-sex marriage after saying conservatives who had taken to the streets to oppose its legalisation by François Hollande had been “humiliated” by the left.

Several French presidential candidates are currently working on their international status in campaign visits abroad. Le Pen, whose offices were raided on Monday as part of an investigation into “fake jobs” involving the misuse of European funds, was in Lebanon this week in an attempt to add to her international credibility on her first official visit to a head of state and her first foreign leader’s handshake, with the president, Michel Aoun, in Beirut. The Socialist party’s Benoît Hamon, currently fourth in the polls, was in Portugal meeting members of the leftwing coalition government in an attempt to show that warring factions of the left can be reconciled.

London has become a compulsory campaign stop for French presidential candidates seeking to boost their international credentials and court the growing expat vote. It is home to about 300,000 of the 400,000 French people in Britain, a population large enough that it would be equal to France’s sixth biggest city in voting terms.

Sarkozy started the trend for “Paris-on-Thames” campaign rallies a decade ago, urging expats to come home and saying: “France is still your country even if you’re disappointed by it.”

The stakes are even higher now that French expats are able to vote for their own MPs in overseas constituencies. The seat for northern Europe, which represents French people in the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia and the Baltic states, is currently held by a Socialist. </s> PARIS, May 17 (Reuters) - Newly inaugurated centrist French president Emmanuel Macron chose his government on Wednesday, appointing a mix of political hues to the top jobs as part of his promise to bridge the right-left divide.

Having already made conservative Edouard Philippe, a member of The Republicans party, his prime minister earlier in the week, Macron picked Bruno Le Maire a pro-European, German-speaking rightist, also from The Republicans, as his economy minister.

As interior minister, he picked Gerard Collomb, the mayor of Lyon who was one of the first Socialists to be a vocal supporter of Macron.

Jean-Yves Le Drian, outgoing Socialist defence minister and a close friend of ex-President Francois Hollande, was named foreign minister and minister for Europe. </s> French centrist presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron has won the backing of Socialist former prime minister Manuel Valls. 

 

 Valls said on BFM television Wednesday he will vote for Macron in the two-round presidential vote on April 23 and May 7 "because I think we must take no risk for the Republic". 

 

 Valls considers the independent as the best candidate to face far-right leader Marine le Pen. His move is a further blow to the campaign of Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon. 

 

 Polls suggest Macron is the front-runner in the election, whereas Hamon has no chance to advance to the runoff. 

 

 Macron thanked Valls for his support on Europe 1 radio, but said he wouldn't be part of his government if elected, because he wants to renew France's political elites. </s> French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday asked his prime minister for names to replace Interior Minister Gerard Collomb, whose resignation Macron had turned down less than 24 hours earlier, a presidency official said.

PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday asked his prime minister for names to replace Interior Minister Gerard Collomb, whose resignation Macron had turned down less than 24 hours earlier, a presidency official said.

Collomb, a former Socialist party stalwart who became one of Macron's earliest backers in his presidential campaign, told Le Figaro newspaper on Tuesday he still wanted to step down to run for mayor of the city of Lyon. </s> The government named by Emmanuel Macron, France’s new heart-on-his-sleeve Europhile president, once again pointedly emphasised the pride of place the European project will receive in his new administration.

Macron set Europhile hearts aflutter on Election Night with the European Union's anthem, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, part of his victory march to the stage at the Louvre Museum. He might have struck up the same band again on Thursday morning as ministers named fewer than 24 hours earlier arrived for their first cabinet meeting.

The nudges and winks to Brussels – and perhaps more pointedly to Berlin – are clear in Macron’s choice of EU veterans and German speakers. After naming Edouard Philippe, a German-speaker who finished high school in Bonn in 1988, as his prime minister on Monday, Macron selected near-perfect German speakers for Finance and Defence.

New Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire spoke to his German counterpart, Wolfgang Schauble, on his very first day in office on Wednesday and scheduled a meeting for next Monday morning in Berlin, from which the Franco-German pair will travel onward to Brussels together for Le Maire’s first European meeting of finance ministers.

A poached catch from the conservative Les Républicains party, the 48-year-old Le Maire began his career as a diplomat and then served as foreign affairs minister and then agriculture minister under former president Nicolas Sarkozy. He was Dominique de Villepin’s chief of staff when the flamboyant Frenchman, then-foreign affairs minister, made his historic 2003 speech at the United Nations Security Council against the war in Iraq.

Unlike some key figures in Le Maire’s former party -- Les Républicains kicked Le Maire out on Wednesday after he joined Macron’s cabinet – France’s new finance chief is an unabashed Europhile. “I share with the president of the Republic the profound conviction going back years that nothing great will happen in Europe without a solid Franco-German friendship,” he said on Wednesday. “It is time for the EU and the euro zone in particular to give themselves that coherence, that power to face up to the power of China, Russia and the United States.”

Le Maire’s conservative political stripe will also reassure European partners – and, again, Berlin in particular; early enthusiasm in Germany for the European integrationist Macron’s May 7 election win over Europhobe populist Marine Le Pen quickly gave way in some quarters to worries about whether the Frenchman’s ultimate success might somehow require Germany to loosen its own purse-strings.

French budgetary discipline – often promised, far more rarely delivered -- is also seen as a critical means of gaining the confidence of Macron’s new counterparts across the bloc. As such, it bears noting that both of the conservatives that Macron cherrypicked for his cabinet have been posted to economic roles. Gérald Darmanin, 34, a onetime Sarkozy protégé, signed on as budget minister.

Meanwhile, under Macron, the foreign minister’s official title has been changed to Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs, inverting – semantically, at least – a time-honoured order of priorities.

The rookie French president, who has made a mission of political renewal, resisted the temptation to name a newcomer to the foreign role and went with a steady hand in Jean-Yves Le Drian. A rare popular figure in François Hollande’s cabinet, Le Drian lasted through the Socialist ex-president’s full five-year term as defence minister.

Under Le Drian, European Affairs has been entrusted to the centrist Marielle de Sarnez, a veteran European politician and specialist who has been elected to the EU Parliament since 1999.

Macron’s new defence minister, Sylvie Goulard, for her part, literally wrote “Europe for Dummies,” or at least its French version, “L’Europe pour les Nuls”. A polyglot Europe specialist and twice-elected member of the European Parliament, the centrist Goulard speaks four languages fluently (French, Italian, German and English). She began her career in France’s foreign ministry in 1989 working on the German reunification portfolio. Later in Brussels, Goulard was political advisor to a European Commission president, Romano Prodi, from 2001 to 2004. She has also taught at Belgium’s prestigious College of Europe in Bruges.

Pundits had expected Goulard to join the government as foreign minister, but the fact she was named at defence sends a strong signal that Macron is serious about his campaign pledge to orchestrate more European integration on security and defence issues.

“This is a strong European signal,” François Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Reuters. “Sylvie Goulard is a professional European, which can only mean one thing – that European defence is one of the priorities.”

The new glut of German-speaking Europhiles at the peak of power in France join similarly inclined Macron associates out of the public eye. Career diplomat Philippe Etienne, Macron’s diplomatic “sherpa” inside the Elysée Palace, was most recently France’s ambassador to Berlin after five years in Brussels. Macron’s speechwriter, Sylvain Fort, has translated 18th-century German Romantic Friedrich Schiller’s plays.

But the new French president knows that before he can act, in earnest, on turning his campaign platform into policy in France, he will need a majority in legislative elections next month. For all its strategic usefulness, Macron’s savvy cherrypicking – the conservative Le Maire and the Socialist Le Drian are respected figures in their respective camps – is surely also designed to deliver tactically on that score as well, piquing the interest potential defectors from rival parties and that of voters alike.

If it works, Macron may find himself with a once-farfetched majority of lawmakers – and a new reason to hum an "Ode to Joy". </s> Former U.S. President Barack Obama endorsed centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron for France’s presidential election on Sunday in a video message in which he praised Macron for appealing “to people’s hopes and not their fears”.

“The French election is very important to the future of France and the values that we care so much about,” Obama said in the message, distributed by Macron’s camp.

Macron “has stood up for liberal values ... He is committed to a better future for the French people. He appeals to people’s hopes and not their fears,” the former president said.

“I am supporting Emmanuel Macron to lead you forward,” Obama said, concluding his statement with the French title of Macron’s party “En Marche!” (Onwards!) and “Vive la France!”.

Macron is widely seen as the favourite to beat the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s runoff vote. </s> PARIS (AFP) - Former United States President Barack Obama endorsed Mr Emmanuel Macron for the French presidency, praising the centrist frontrunner's "liberal values" in a video posted on Thursday (May 4) on the candidate's website.

Mr Macron has "stood up for liberal values (and) put forward a vision for the important role that France plays in Europe and around the world," Mr Obama says in the video, adding: "He appeals to people's hopes and not their fears.
Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announces he is backing Emmanuel Macron in the election.