PARIS —
France votes Sunday in the first round of presidential elections in which
Emmanuel Macron is bidding for a second term in the face of a strengthening
challenge from resurgent far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
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In an election
whose outcome is crucial for the future direction of France and also Europe,
the first round will determine which two candidates go through to the run-off
on April 24.
Polls project that
the final two will be Macron and
Le Pen, in a repeat of their duel from 2017
that saw the centrist macron become France’s youngest-ever head of state.
With the
traditional Socialist and right-wing parties that dominated French politics for
the last decades facing near electoral oblivion, far-left politician
Jean-Luc Melenchon is projected to come third, though he believes he could still reach
the second round.
While Macron
handily trounced Le Pen five years ago, the veteran anti-immigration campaigner
has sought to rebrand herself with a softer image and has closed the gap with
the president in recent opinion polls.
‘Possible to defeat
Macron’
Macron entered the campaign at the last minute, saying he had been
focusing on ending
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while Le Pen has crossed the
country seeking to strike a chord with the French on issues of daily concern.
The president
addressed his first major campaign event only on Saturday, a rock concert-style
rally where he entered like a prizefighter but warned that defeat to Le Pen was
possible.
“Look at what
happened with Brexit, and so many other elections: what looked improbable
actually happened,” Macron said, alluding not least to Donald Trump’s defeat of
Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US elections.
Macron received a
poll boost in the immediate aftermath of President Vladimir Putin’s decision to
invade Ukraine, but in the last weeks, Le Pen has been eating away at what once
looked like an unassailable lead.
A survey published
Monday by Harris Interactive showed Macron’s second-round lead at its narrowest
yet, at 51.5 percent against Le Pen’s 48.5 percent.
“What people said
was the automatic re-election of Emmanuel Macron turned out to be fake news,”
Le Pen said on Friday.
“It is perfectly
possible to defeat Emmanuel Macron and radically change the politics of this
country,” she added.
Other polls have
credited Macron with a slightly wider margin that is still too close for
comfort. An Ifop-Fiducial poll, also published Monday, showed Macron at 53
percent against 47 percent for Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen has
seen a “strong dynamic at the end of the campaign ... The second round promises
to be much tighter than 2017” when Macron won with over 66 percent of the vote,
said Jean-Daniel Levy, director at Harris Interactive.
‘A clan not a rally’
The stakes are huge, with Macron vowing further reforms of France if he
wins a new term, and set to retain his status as
Europe’s number one figure
after the departure of former German chancellor Angela Merkel.
A Le Pen
presidency would likely see a tougher stance from France on immigration and
integration, and raise questions over whether Paris can retain its global
diplomatic clout in a world shadowed by Russian aggression.
She has sought to
detoxify her party from the heritage of its founder and her father Jean-Marie
Le Pen, not least by renaming it the National Rally (RN) instead of the
National Front (FN), but Macron and his allies insist it has not changed.
“It’s not a rally,
it’s a clan,” Macron said in an interview with regional newspapers published on
Monday.
While Social Democrat
Olaf Scholz has succeeded
Merkel, the right has been surging elsewhere in Europe with Hungarian Prime
Minister Viktor Orban, Putin’s closest ally within the EU, securing a new term
in elections at the weekend.
Should he win, Macron
would be the first French president since Jacques Chirac in 2002 to win a
second term after the presidencies of right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy and
Socialist Francois Hollande ended in one-term disappointments.
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