Marine Le Pen ensures Emmanuel Macron won’t have it all his way in France

French right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen is closing in on President Emmanuel Macron in polling only days out from French presidential elections.

French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. Picture: AFP

French right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen is closing in on President Emmanuel Macron in polling only days out from French presidential elections.

Voters will cast their first-round preferences on Sunday as Mr Macron bids for a second term in the face of a strengthening challenge from the resurgent Ms Le Pen.

In an election where the 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 Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen, in a repeat of their duel from 2017 that saw the centrist become France’s youngest head of state.

With the traditional Socialist and right-wing parties that dominated French politics for 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.

But while Mr Macron handily trounced Ms 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.

The latest Harris poll this week showed Mr Macron’s second-round lead at its narrowest yet, at 51.5 per cent against Le Pen’s 48.5 per cent. Other polls have credited the President with a slightly wider margin but still too close for comfort. An Ifop-Fiducial poll on Monday showed Mr Macron at 53 per cent against 47 per cent for Ms Le Pen.

Mr Macron entered the campaign at the last minute, saying he had been focusing on ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while Ms 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 prize-fighter but warned that defeat to Ms Le Pen was possible.

“Look at what happened with Brexit, and so many other elections: what looked improbable actually happened,” he said, alluding not least to Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US elections.

Mr Macron received a poll boost in the immediate aftermath of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, but in the past weeks Ms Le Pen has been eating away at what once looked an unassailable lead.

“What people said was the automatic re-election of Emmanuel Macron turned out to be fake news,” Ms Le Pen said last Friday.

“It is perfectly possible to defeat Emmanuel Macron and radically change the politics of this country.”

Ms 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 per cent of the vote, said Jean-Daniel Levy, director at Harris Interactive polling.

The stakes are huge, with Mr Macron vowing further reforms of France if he wins, and set to retain his status as Europe’s No. 1 figure after the departure of former German chancellor Angela Merkel.

French President Emmanuel Macron. Picture: AFP

A Le Pen presidency would likely see a tougher stand 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 Mr Macron and his allies insist it has not changed.

“It’s not a rally, it’s a clan,” he said this week.

While Social Democrat Olaf Scholz has succeeded Mrs Merkel in Germany, the right has been surging elsewhere in Europe, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Mr Putin’s closest ally within the EU, securing a new term in elections at the weekend.

Should he win, Mr 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.

Polls project Mr Macron winning the first round with a score in the high 20s, followed by Ms Le Pen and then Mr Melenchon.

The far left-leader of the France Unbowed (LFI) party, Mr Melenchon is banking on a late surge fuelled by an unusual meeting late on Tuesday where he appeared as a hologram simultaneously in 12 cities across the country from a live rally in the central city of Lille.

“Macron against Le Pen – it’s not going to happen,” he insisted, saying he could even sneak into the second round at the expense of Mr Macron. “Look at the (poll) curves,” he told Sud Radio.

Elsewhere on the left, the Greens and Communist candidates failed to make an impact, while Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is projected to struggle to reach even 2 per cent.

Valerie Pecresse, the candidate of the main right-wing Republicans party, the political home of former presidents including Mr Chirac and Mr Sarkozy, also appears out of contention after a campaign that never found momentum.

Mr Sarkozy, who retains influence on the right despite criminal convictions in graft scandals, has not even bothered to endorse Ms Pecresse, a major setback for her.

Extreme-right pundit Eric Zemmour made a sensational entry into the campaign last year but has gradually lost ground, with analysts saying he has aided Ms Le Pen by making her appear more moderate.

AFP