French President Emmanuel Macron told a podcast episode shown Monday that both the far right National Rally (RN) party and the left-wing New Popular Front coalition — front runners in the parliamentary election — risked bringing “civil war” to France.

Macron told the podcast “Generation Do It Yourself” that the manifesto of the RN party — which election pollsters put in first place — and their solutions to deal with fears over crime and immigration were based upon “stigmatization or division”.

“I think that the solutions given by the far right are out of the question, because it is categorizing people in terms of their religion or origins and that is why it leads to division and to civil war,” he told the podcast.

Macron made the same criticism of the France Unbowed (LFI) extreme left-wing party, which forms part of the New Popular Front coalition.

“But that one as well, there is a civil war behind that because you are solely categorizing people in terms of their religious outlook or the community they belong to, which in a way is a means of justifying isolating them from the broader national community and in this case, you would have a civil war with those who do not share those same values,” said Macron.