The president is facing challenges from right-wing candidates in this year’s election Muslim immigration, especially from France’s former colonies, is likely to be a key issue in April’s vote LONDON: French President Emmanuel Macron has promised a clampdown on immigration in an attempt to lure France’s working-class voters ahead of this year’s presidential election. Macron is facing challenges from two far-right figures, Marine le Pen and Eric Zemmour, both of whom have expressed anti-migrant — and at times anti-Muslim — sentiments. On a visit to the northern French rustbelt, where National Rally’s Le Pen enjoys significant support, Macron outlined EU-level plans for the bloc to reinforce its external borders that would curb the number of migrants reaching France. He also promised additional funding for home and infrastructure renovations to prop-up disaffected and run-down mining communities. Macron, despite not having officially announced he is running for a second term as president, is the current favorite to win the first round of France’s multi-stage election. He is followed by Le Pen, center-right candidate Valerie Pecresse, and TV pundit Zemmour. Le Pen and Zemmour argue that French identity risks being lost amid a flow of mainly Muslim migrants from the country’s former colonies. The president’s Wednesday visit to Le Pen’s stronghold region indicates an effort to rebrand his image among working-class voters after long being seen as a wealthy Parisian uninterested in the concerns of ordinary people. The region is home to many of the makeshift camps established by migrants on their way to the UK, to the exasperation of locals. In a previous interview, he suggested that migrants were exploiting the EU’s border-free zone to reach France, warning that local anger about these issues could result in a wider backlash against EU free movement policies. The answer, he said, is to keep illegal immigrants out of the bloc in the first place. “Our ... free movement is threatened if we don’t manage to hold our external borders and to survey whom enters,” he said, adding that Europe’s border agency was planning to employ 10,000 guards by 2027, up from about 6,600 today. He also called for reforms to the EU’s asylum system to stop claimants demanding refugee status in one country if they had been denied in another.