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PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen used the final hours of Friday’s election campaign to portray this weekend’s presidential election as a referendum on the country’s future, as polls pointed to the incumbent’s increasing lead.
The latest poll results show Macron is 10 percentage points ahead of Le Pen and has gained some momentum after a close finish in the first round two weeks ago.
But an upset Le Pen victory still remains a possibility. The final polls fell nearly nine percentage points short of the lead five years ago, and turnout could play a crucial role in Sunday’s vote.
Macron vs. Le Pen 2022: What you should know about the runoff in the French presidential election
Both candidates appeared eager to avoid any unwelcome surprises on Friday, making their final campaign stops on areas they won in the first round and whose votes they will need in the runoff. Le Pen, 53, met with voters in the Pas-de-Calais region, a far-right stronghold, and visited a medical center in a last-ditch effort to present herself as a candidate close to people, including those who feel forgotten by Macron’s government.
“We ran an outreach campaign, a field campaign. I met tens of thousands of French people,” she said. “I think we did a very good campaign.”
Macron, 44, meanwhile traveled to Figeac in southern France, where he was 13 percentage points ahead of Le Pen two weeks ago. The incumbent did almost no campaigning prior to the first round, but pushed hard in that final phase.
French law prohibits any election campaign or publication of polls from midnight on Friday until the election results are known.
The biggest challenge for Macron is no longer “the number of votes Le Pen himself will get,” but his ability to fight any inclination among the people who supported him in 2017 to suspend voting this time, said Antoine Jardin, a political scientist .
Macron’s re-election strategy has largely focused on reaching out to left-leaning voters and attempting to reactivate France’s “Republican Front” – a broad coalition of voters to thwart a far-right presidency.
“France is a bloc,” Macron said on Friday, addressing voters in Figeac.
Five years ago, this coalition helped Macron beat Le Pen by more than 30 percentage points.
But now Le Pen has brought the far right closer than ever to the French presidency – which has raised concerns in other European capitals.
Europe fears a possible Le Pen presidency in France as a threat from within
In an unusual comment on Friday, the leaders of Germany, Spain and Portugal suggested French voters should re-elect Macron to defend themselves against a far-right threat to European values. The play did not name either candidate directly.
“The choice the French face is crucial for France and for all of us in Europe,” the three leaders wrote in France’s centre-left Le Monde. “You must choose between a democratic candidate who believes that France is stronger in a powerful and autonomous European Union, and a far-right candidate who openly sides with those who attack our freedom and democracy, which are the core values which we inherited straight from the French Enlightenment.”
Macron targets Le Pen for Russia, Putin tangled in French election debate
Macron chose similar language to attack Le Pen in Wednesday’s televised debate – the candidates’ only face-to-face meeting. He portrayed her as more radical than she would admit and committed to Russian interests, citing a loan from a Russian state bank for her 2017 campaign.
Le Pen called Macron’s allegations “defamatory” on Friday.
French President Emmanuel Macron is attempting to stave off a victory for far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the April 24 presidential election. (Video: James Cornsilk, Rick Noack, Alexa Juliana Ard/The Washington Post, Photo: Jackie Lay/The Washington Post)
In 2017, on the Friday night before the election, just before the mandatory end of the campaign, thousands of internal Macron campaign emails were leaked by hackers with links to Russia. It was widely seen as a Russian attempt to bolster Le Pen, who had regularly expressed his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, was highly critical of NATO, and advocated France’s exit from the European Union.
In this campaign, Le Pen tried to moderate her image and distance herself from Putin. She condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and said she would welcome Ukrainian refugees to France.
“Changing your position on Vladimir Putin and Russia was a must,” said Martin Quencez, deputy director of the German Marshall Fund’s Paris office. “There was no other solution.”
How Marine Le Pen moderated her image and approached the French Presidency
She still opposes an embargo on Russian oil and gas and wants a referendum to end immigration.
But polls suggest that French voters have been thinking more about economic issues than foreign policy this campaign season.
Le Pen has propagated that Macron does not understand the concerns of the middle class. She has refuted the notion that Macron, a former investment banker, is a “president of the rich” who can be distant and arrogant.
In an interview on Friday, Macron dismissed accusations of arrogance as a “political argument”.
Macron caused a stir in France when he ran for the first time in 2017, launching his own movement and promising to bring a different kind of politics to the Élysée Palace. But enthusiasm for him as incumbent was more limited. Some left-leaning voters have expressed frustration that he has veered to the right on issues like immigration and security.
Around 3,000 people attended his rally in the southern city of Marseille last weekend. In the Paris suburb of Saint Denis, where he was attending an urban regeneration project and boxing at a sports club on Thursday, he was greeted with chants calling for his resignation.
Speaking to a crowd in a medieval market square in Figeac on Friday, Macron pledged more support for small towns and rural communities “which have sometimes been neglected over the last 20 years,” he acknowledged.
Although Figeac was a center of Yellow Vest protests against inequality in 2019, the city could also be said to embody Macron’s vision for France: rooted in its history, true to its values, but poised to benefit from an increasingly globalized world.
Nestled between lush hills, a river and a pilgrimage route, the city has benefited from its proximity to nearby Airbus factories and has nurtured local businesses and their institute of technology. Figeac’s population is relatively young and the far right is struggling to gain a foothold there.
Middle-aged voters in France, between 30 and 60, appeared to be the most receptive to their campaign.
While older voters have been largely behind other nationalist victories, such as the Trump presidency and Britain’s vote to leave the EU, France’s older generation is a major obstacle to a Le Pen victory.
Many in this age group vividly remember what the party stood for before Le Pen took it over from her father, who described the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail” of World War II.
Meanwhile, the youngest voters may be voting mostly for left-wing candidates, but they’re also not as concerned about Le Pen.
“There are two conflicting trends: Younger generations are much more concerned about race issues, gender issues, personal and sexual freedoms” than older voters, Jardin said. “But they also less often perceive Marine Le Pen as a strongly right-wing extremist racist than older voters.”
The decision of some left-leaning voters to abstain from Sunday’s vote could hinge on a risky bet: they don’t want Le Pen to become president, but they hope a closer-than-expected election result could force Macron to rescind their election to incorporate concerns over the next five years to be taken more into account.
“If he wins by a bigger margin than expected,” Jardin said, it would make it easier for Macron “to do what he wants.”