French election: Macron’s lead over Le Pen cut days before first vote
Polling for the French Presidential race has drastically tightened with less than a week before the first round of voting.
Emmanuel Macron’s large lead over far-right challenger Marine Le Pen has shrunk over the past month, with a recent IFOP poll showing the incumbent ahead 53-47 in a head-to-head run-off.
Macron and Le Pen are widely expected to have the most votes from the 12 candidates in the first round of the election.
This would see the pair face-off in a second round of voting in a replay of the 2017 contest.
One of the largest issues of the election is the cost of living crisis in France, which echoes what households are experiencing in Britain.
Le Pen is running on a platform of tax cuts to ease the burden on families, while concentrating less on her traditional campaign issues of immigration, security and Euroscepticism.
It has seen her pick up steam in the race, with the National Rally leader telling Reuters that “I’m like the phoenix rising from the ashes”.
She said during a recent campaign visit that reports of an easy Macron victory were “fake news” and that “it is perfectly possible to defeat Emmanuel Macron and radically change the politics of this country”.
Annual inflation is rising in France and hit 4.5 per cent in March, however this is far behind the type of headline figures seen in the UK, US, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.
Macron said at his first official election rally on Saturday that he would hand out a tax-free rebate of up to €6,000 for the country’s workers if re-elected.
“French people who work shouldn’t have to spend their whole salary filling up their petrol tanks and shopping, that’s unfair,” he said.
Warning people to not be complacent in the election, he added: “Look at what happened with Brexit, and so many other elections – what looked improbable actually happened.
“The danger of extremism has reached new heights because, in recent months and years, hatred, and alternative truths have been normalised.”
The French President is also pitting himself as a centrist statesman who is able to counter the forces of extremism in his country.
The three largest challengers to Macron are all either on the far-left or far-right as French politics continues to be wracked by division and extremes.
The President has had to deal with a series of crises throughout his five-year term, including the “gilets jaunes” riots, numerous terrorist attacks, Covid and now the Russo-Ukraine war.
The French public’s reaction to his job in steering the country through this period has been mixed, with Macron often suffering from poor approval ratings.
“I didn’t succeed in convincing people that the extreme right is not the answer,” Macron said today.