PARIS 

The next two weeks look to be decisive for France as the presidential race enters its uncertain final stretch after Sunday’s polls qualified incumbent President Emmanuel Macron and right-wing rival candidate Marine Le Pen to face off in round two.

The polls on April 24 could either maintain the status quo with the reelection of Republic on the Move party candidate Macron or move the country sharply to the right with the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen. If this seems familiar, it’s a return match from the final round of the 2017 elections, during which Macron, then 39 years old, seized victory to be France’s youngest president to date.

Yet pollsters swear the 2022 clincher is different, arguing that Le Pen’s rise in popularity is a bigger factor than anti-Macron sentiment.

Tough battles, camps divided

Macron himself is well aware that his battle with Le Pen won’t be an easy conquest, after the rough five years of his first term that saw a host of controversies and public backlashes, peppered by his controversial remarks about wanting to “piss off the French.”

“I am ready to invent something new … I know nothing is decided,” he said after winning the first round of the election with an estimated 27-28% of the vote. He promised to bring together fellow compatriots who want to oppose the far right.

Defeated rivals from the left, far-left, socialist, conservative, and green camps Jean-Luc Melenchon, Fabien Roussel, Anne Hidalgo, Valerie Pecresse, and Yannick Jadot are calling on their followers not to support Macron. To grab these extra votes, Macron must work over the next two weeks to appeal to these supporters and win over anti-Macron and undecided voters.

On the other end, speaking to her jubilant supporters after scoring 23-24% in the polls, Le Pen called on those opposed to Macron to join her ranks.

“The French have obviously wanted to arbitrate between two opposing visions of the future,” she said, acknowledging the dividing fault lines. Right-wing candidates Erick Zemmour of the Reconquest party and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan of the Stand Up France party have come out in support of Le Pen. Their voters in turn are more likely to transfer their votes to Le Pen than choose Macron.

Right’s left-wing agenda vs Center’s right-wing policies

Le Pen today represents a vast constituency of French voters, not just from the right-wing voter base but also those who are angry and disappointed with Macron. She has received votes of more than 8 million French people from the 25-49 age group.

Le Pen holds radical hard-line views on foreign policy and immigration. She claims to seek an "alliance with Russia” on European security, as well as withdrawing France from the NATO military alliance, upholding the superiority of French law over European law, and expelling irregular immigrants, “delinquents,” foreign criminals, and undocumented minors.

However, she has also advocated tax cuts such as abolishing VAT on 100 essential items, lowering taxes on fuel and electricity from 20% to 5.5%, and replacing the tax on real estate wealth with a new tax on financial wealth, issues which have given her an edge on economic issues over than Macron. It is these voters on the left that Le Pen is eyeing in the second round.

Macron has won close to 10 million votes, most from aged voters 60 and older. In 2017, he projected himself as a young liberal leader who would do everything in his power to fight the extreme right and deliver social and economic justice to middle class and poor households.

Instead, his government’s policies focused on proposing a new fuel tax, (scrapped after it spurred the 2018 Yellow Vest protests), reforming labor laws to make dismissal of employees easier, passing legislation to fight “radical Islam” and so-called separatist ideologies, and strengthening domestic security laws giving the police more authority, moves opponents say have pandered to right-wing populism.

Macron has proposed offering more tax cuts for businesses and households, raising the retirement age to 65, and drafting thousands of new nurses, police officers, and judges.

Moving into the second round, the Ifop institute poll for TF1 and LCI news has predicted voters under age 35 years are likely to choose Le Pen, while Macron will dominate the older population above 65 years, who want to see stability and continuity in politics as opposed to the transformation that the National Rally candidate would usher in.

Winning probabilities

Most polls have estimated that up to 54% of people intend to cast their vote in the second round for Macron as against 46% for Marine Le Pen. Estimates provide a safe winning margin for Macron’s re-election, but it marks 12% fewer votes than in 2017, when he won with 66.10% of the vote against 34% for Marine Le Pen.

A large number of undecided voters and a low voter turnout rate could be the major deciding factors in the final round, which is estimated to be much tighter than five years ago and could see surprises.

According to BFMTV’s Elabe poll, supporters of far-left candidate Melenchon and conservative leader Pecresse will not so easily shift to Macron’s camp but will be divided between the two finalists.

Le Pen too should get votes from Zemmour and Dupont-Aignan supporters provided she seeks reconciliation with certain voter groups. Le Pen’s remarks that Zemmour has Nazis in his camp and that he is trying to wage a religious war have not gone down well with his supporters. Her niece, Marion Marechal, who defected to be a Zemmour advocate, said it would be difficult for Le Pen to win on her own without making alliances with the right wing.

The two finalists represent starkly opposite extremes of ideologies and political programs. Whether the French will choose to vote against Macron to protest his policy failures or give the chance to Le Pen to herald a new political change may become clear as the two leaders set out for the last round of campaigning.

At stake is not just the election of the leader of the French people but also widening schisms domestically and France's representation within Europe and internationally, with the raging Russian war on Ukraine looming large in the background.