DENAIN (Reuters) - Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen traded blows at a distance on Monday over who would best protect French voters' purchasing power, kicking off a tense fight to win the presidential election runoff on April 24.
Macron, a pro-European centrist who became president in 2017 after easily beating Le Pen when voters rallied behind him to keep the far-right out of power, is facing a much tougher challenge this time.
He is slightly ahead in polls, but Le Pen, who ahead of Sunday's first round successfully tapped into anger over the cost of living and a perception that Macron is disconnected from everyday hardships, pressed on those points on Monday.
"Emmanuel Macron, if by some mischance he was re-elected, would feel totally free to continue his policy of social wreckage," Le Pen said on a visit to a rural area southeast of Paris, mocking his comments on her policy plans and urging him to read her manifesto.
Warning of the "dark clouds" that inflation cast on France, she said Macron had failed to protect the French, adding that she would, if elected, slash the VAT on energy and bring it to zero for 100 essential food and hygiene products "so the French can continue to put fuel in their car ... and feed themselves."
Macron had equally harsh words about his rival, telling La Voix du Nord newspaper in an interview on Monday, "Mrs. Le Pen is a demagogue. She is someone who tells people what they want to hear when they want to hear it."
Macron, who has repeatedly accused Le Pen of lying, said her economic promises were a fantasy.
On a walkabout in Denain, one of the country's poorest towns in its former industrial heartland, he warned voters that Le Pen, who has successfully focused her campaign on the cost-of-living issues troubling millions, would not be able to finance her populist economic agenda and that she was lying to voters.
In hours of sometimes heated exchanges, locals called Macron out on everything from his plans to push back the retirement age to his saying at the height of the Omicron phase of the COVID-19 pandemic that he wanted to "piss off" anti-vaxxers.
"I said that lovingly," he told a bewildered local about the much-commented "piss-off" comment.
