Far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has announced that she is stepping aside as leader of her National Front (FN) party.<\/p>\n
The move comes just a day after she reached the second round of the French election, where she will face centrist Emmanuel Macron.<\/p>\n
Ms Le Pen told French TV she needed to be above partisan considerations.<\/p>\n
Opinion polls suggest Mr Macron is firm favourite for the second round but Ms Le Pen said: “We can win, we will win.”<\/p>\n
The French term she used signalled that the move to step aside would be temporary.<\/p>\n
She told France 2 that France was approaching a “decisive moment”.<\/p>\n
Ms Le Pen said her decision had been made out of the “profound conviction” that the president must bring together all of the French people.<\/p>\n
“So, this evening, I am no longer the president of the National Front. I am the candidate for the French presidency,” she said.<\/p>\n
The BBC’s Hugh Schofield in Paris says this is a symbolic act intended to show her concerns are for the country as a whole and not for her party, and that she is reaching out for the voters of candidates defeated in the first round, particularly those of the Republicans’ Fran\u00e7ois Fillon.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, also on Monday, Mr Fillon told party leaders that he “no longer had the legitimacy” to take the party into legislative elections that will follow next month’s presidential run-off.<\/p>\n
He said he would become “an ordinary activist like any other”.<\/p>\n
Ms Le Pen took over the FN leadership from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in January 2011.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has announced that she is stepping aside as leader of her National Front (FN) party. The move comes just a day after she reached the second round of the French election, where she will face centrist Emmanuel Macron. Ms Le Pen told French TV she needed to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[6528,6521],"class_list":["post-313645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international","tag-france-elections","tag-le-pen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=313645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=313645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=313645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=313645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}