A trial of “immense significance” for the future of France began this week, said Florian Harms on T-Online (Berlin). Marine Le Pen, 57-year-old head of the far-right National Rally (RN) party, was convicted last year of embezzling millions of euros of EU funds, handed a four-year prison sentence and banned from running for office for the next five years.

But now she is appealing that conviction. And if she wins on appeal and goes on to win next year’s presidential election, as polls suggest she well might, the fundamental values of the Fifth Republic will be imperilled.

Her programme is one of national isolation, of withdrawing France from the structures of the European Union; she and her party have scant regard for democratic checks and balances. The judges in the Paris appeal court hold France’s destiny in their hands.

Change of strategy

Mind you, Le Pen is taking a big risk in appealing her conviction, said Jedrzej Bielecki in Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw). Yes, some feel the four-year prison sentence she received last March was unduly harsh. Yet as it stands, she won’t spend any time behind bars. Two of those years were suspended; the other two she is to serve with an electronic tag at home. Should she lose her appeal, however, the judges could well decide to up that to ten years in jail. The crime for which she was convicted is no small one, after all: she was judged to have been “at the heart” of a decade-long system of embezzlement, in which taxpayers’ money allocated to MEPs by Brussels to defray the cost of staff assistance in the European Parliament was instead syphoned off to pay for her party workers in France.

Le Pen has previously insisted no crime was committed and that she has been the victim of a judicial “witch-hunt”, said Anthony Berthelier on HuffPost (Paris). And it was the judges’ fear that if she couldn’t see that she had committed a crime she might very well do the same again, which is what persuaded them to ban her from running for office for five years.

So this time round Le Pen has changed her tune: her defence strategy is now to admit a crime was indeed committed but that she was unaware of it, and that it was the European Parliament’s fault for not alerting her to it. But this new strategy could easily backfire: blaming the victim for the crime, which is what this looks like, may not go down well with the court.

‘Badly dented’ image

Actually, it may be no bad thing for her RN party if she does fail in her appeal, said Anaïs Gerbaud in L’Echo Republicain (Chartres). It’s true that, ever since she took over the reins of the party in 2011 from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, and sought to “civilise” it, its vote share in presidential elections has soared, rising to 41.45% in 2022.

“She has never been so close to success,” said Bielecki. But now there are signs that the corruption scandal “has badly dented her image”. Only 36% of respondents in a recent survey in Le Monde felt that “she has been treated more harshly by the courts than the average French person”. More to the point, the party has a far better alternative to her waiting in the wings: its charismatic 30-year-old party president, Jordan Bardella. He is free of the antisemitic and racist taint still associated with the name “Le Pen”, and he now seems to be more popular with voters than his mentor. In the Le Monde poll, 49% of respondents saw Bardella as the candidate who “has the best chance of winning the presidential election”, compared with just 18% for Le Pen.

Whoever its candidate is, RN’s victory is no foregone conclusion, said Le Monde (Paris). The party may command a strong lead in the polls, but Le Pen’s and Bardella’s ideological ties to Donald Trump and “past closeness with Putin” could prove damaging. All is not lost: there’s still time for RN’s opponents to up their game and dispel the “illusory promises of the far-right”.

Far-right leaders including Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini, Geert Wilders and even a spokesperson for Vladimir Putin have rushed to brand Marine Le Pen's conviction for embezzling EU funds to pay National Rally (RN) party staff "a conspiracy to take out one of the continent's most prominent illiberal figures", said the FT.

Le Pen is calling it an attack on "the will of the people", much like US President Donald Trump's claims that he is the victim of a "witch hunt", said CNN's Dominic Thomas. And indeed, for supporters of Le Pen's party, the ruling bolsters a belief that "the system is rigged against them".

Beyond France

Populist politicians have been keen to align the verdict with Romania's recent ban of far-right candidate Călin Georgescu from its presidential race. Sławomir Mentzen, who leads Poland's far-right Confederation party, said it was "the second time after Romania that the system has removed candidates who might pose a threat to it".

Uneasiness with the verdict extends beyond Le Pen's political stablemates, too. "This is lawfare," said James Tidmarsh in The Spectator. Many European Parliament staff routinely work for their national parties without attracting notice, giving the impression that the rule under which Le Pen was found guilty "only seems to be enforced when politically useful". When an obscure law is "weaponised" to remove a candidate from the ballot, you have a "legitimacy crisis" for democracy.

The backlash shows how tricky it is for any court to enforce the rule of law on popular politicians. Even some figures on the left were critical of the decision: Greek economist and former politician Yanis Varoufakis wrote on X: "France's neo-fascists will only benefit from this."

Isn't it ironic?

But, said French Liberal MEP Pascal Canfin on X: "The RN had only one thing to do to avoid finding itself in this situation: not cheat."

During Le Pen's rise to power she styled herself as an anti-corruption crusader, calling for tougher sentences for politicians who commit any financial impropriety. "Everyone has taken money from the till except the Front National," she said in 2004.

The court heard that the RN treated the European Parliament like a "cash cow" and that some of the bogus parliamentary staff had never met the MEPs for whom they ostensibly worked nor been to Brussels, said The Guardian. Even so, it's likely that Le Pen's core supporters will continue to back her: the strong sentence serves the "victimisation narrative" she is presenting to her supporters, just like Trump's criminal convictions. But Le Pen has long tried to make her party appear more mainstream and respectable among moderate voters beyond the party's core base. "That endeavour is now damaged, even if she positions herself as a victim."

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There is perhaps no politician in Europe today who embodies the continent's far-right more than Marine Le Pen. Her thrice-unsuccessful presidential runs on a staunch anti-immigration platform have positioned Le Pen as one of the elder statesmen in Europe's rightward political lurch for more than a decade, alongside similar figures like Hungary's Viktor Orban and Germany's Alice Weidel. But after years of working to make France a more restrictive place culturally and economically, Le Pen's political fortunes may have finally run out: On March 31, a French court convicted her of embezzling millions in European Parliament funds, sentencing Le Pen not only to several years of prison time but also barring her from running for political office for the next five years.

Reportedly muttering "incredible" as she stormed out of the courtroom before her sentence was fully announced, Le Pen now finds herself in political exile while the movement she once led scrambles to persevere in her absence. Though she has vowed to appeal her conviction, Le Pen's political future is now wholly unclear, as is the future of her National Rally Party, and French domestic politics as a whole.

What did the commentators say?

Le Pen's conviction and sentence is "setting off a democratic crisis in France" and could "usher in a period of renewed political turmoil" if Le Pen chooses to attack the sitting French government, or if public anger "spills over into the streets," The New York Times said. The verdict is a "political earthquake" that has succeeded in "upending France's political order" and thrust her political party "into limbo," The Wall Street Journal said.

Already, many of Europe's leading right-wing figures have "quickly rallied to her defense after the decision," said CNN, including the Kremlin, which described her conviction as "trampling on democratic norms." Le Pen's punishment is like a "bad film" and a "declaration of war by Brussels," said Italian nationalist Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini on X. It's not merely Le Pen herself being punished, but "French democracy that is being executed," said Jordan Bardella, Le Pen's protege and current president of the National Rally. "Je suis Marine!" said Hungarian authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on X. Le Pen's sentence will "backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump," said Elon Musk on X.

Le Pen's court-imposed ineligibility to run for office could lead to a "major internal rift" within her National Rally Party, said Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, to The Washington Post. While the party's various factions "all fall in behind Le Pen," her replacement Bardella may be a "lot less effective in corralling" the party to "remain disciplined and united and to cohere around one view."

What next?

It could be "18 months to two years before Le Pen gets her appeal hearing," the BBC said, given the French judicial system's "overloaded" calendar. In addition to her candidacy ban, Le Pen was sentenced to four years in prison, with two years suspended and the other two potentially "served under a form of house arrest," the Times said.

Crucially, should she decide to, Le Pen will be able to "perform her retaliation at the Assemblée Nationale" where she sits as an MP in a seat "not immediately threatened" by the ban on future runs for office, said Le Monde. In the days leading up to her conviction, Le Pen's National Rally Party "suddenly stepped up its threats" to "topple" Prime Minister Francois Bayrou's government in what "appeared to be a deliberate diversion" from her then-looming sentencing. Meanwhile, as Le Pen's party contemplates a replacement for her in the 2027 elections, it risks "losing the momentum it had built up" in recent years, all while even further-right groups look to "capitalize on their main adversary's downfall."

Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has died aged 96, was a major figure in French public life, and a founder of the far-right National Front. A sometimes violent rabblerouser who claimed, like other extremists, to be merely saying the things that "others think but dare not put into words", he insisted that "the races are unequal", and that anyone with Aids was "a kind of leper", said The New York Times. He referred to the Nazi gas chambers as just "a detail" in the history of the War; and described the Nazi occupation of France – when 76,000 Jews were deported to death camps – as "not especially inhumane". Latterly, he'd embraced the "great replacement theory", which holds that a conspiracy is under way to replace Europe's whites with immigrant Muslims.

Millions were appalled by his views, but he commanded enough support to spend 30 years in the European Parliament, and he made five runs for the presidency. For the first decades of his career, Le Pen operated at the margins, said The Times. In 1974's presidential election, two years after the launch of the National Front, he won less than 1% of the vote. But his share rose to 15% in elections in the 1980s, said The Daily Telegraph, as the economy stumbled, heavy industries went into retreat and France's failure to assimilate its Arab immigrants started to bite.

Exploiting France's sense of "malaise", Le Pen rallied a broad coalition, made up of working-class voters in deindustrialised areas who believed that immigrants were taking "French" jobs; conservative Catholics; and city dwellers concerned by the levels of crime in the immigrant ghettos of the banlieue.

A compelling speaker, Le Pen sought to make his views seem reasonable. "What I resemble most," he said, "is an ordinary Frenchman." It paid off in 2002, when he unexpectedly beat the Socialist PM Lionel Jospin into third place in the first round of the presidential election, with 17% of the vote. He'd benefitted from the left-wing vote being split between multiple smaller parties, and was never likely to win the run-off.

Nevertheless, the result sent shockwaves through Europe, and led to mass protests and a campaign to persuade left-wingers to rally around President Chirac in the second round, though Chirac was immersed in a sleaze scandal. "Vote for the crook, not the fascist," ran the slogan. Chirac went on to win with a record 82%. Le Pen's career had peaked. He lost his seat in the European Parliament in 2003, following his prosecution for physically attacking a female Socialist politician; he came fourth in the 2007 election; and in 2015, he was expelled from the National Front by its new leader – his daughter from his first marriage, Marine Le Pen – for restating his views about the Holocaust. She had been trying to "detoxify" the party to make it more electable.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in Brittany in 1928. His father, a fisherman, was killed in 1942 when his boat hit a British-laid mine. His mother was a seamstress. In his teens, he was expelled from his lycée for troublemaking. After that, he moved to Paris, where he studied law, became involved in student politics – and fought street brawls with communists. Appalled by the threat to France's colonial empire, he joined the Foreign Legion, and fought in French Indochina.

He was elected to the National Assembly on a right-wing ticket in 1956; and the next year travelled to Algeria to take part in the Battle of Algiers, where there is evidence that he engaged in torture (he denied it). He helped launch the National Front in 1972, and served as its president until he retired in 2011. Renamed National Rally, the party is currently the second-largest in the National Assembly. Le Pen admitted to having been the "most hated man in France"; but surveying the rise of far-right parties across Europe, he liked to say that his ideas were simply "ahead of their time".

Marine Le Pen's political trajectory looks more uncertain than ever after prosecutors called for a temporary ban on the far-right French leader's public office ambitions.

In the last stretch of her trial for the alleged embezzlement of EU funds, Prosecutor Nicolas Barret delivered his closing statement before the Paris criminal court on Wednesday, demanding that Le Pen – a prominent face of France's far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party – face a five-year jail sentence, a €300,000 (£249,439) fine, and a five-year ban on running for public office.

"This last one would be the most significant for Le Pen herself, as it could disqualify her from running for president in the next election – set to be held in 2027," said The Local.

Le Pen has staunchly denied the embezzlement accusations brought against her and 24 others. In court this week, she "promptly denounced the prosecutors' motion as excessive, branding it an 'outrage' and accusing prosecutors of trying to 'ruin the (RN) party'", said Le Monde.

She continued: "I think the prosecutors' wish is to deprive the French people of the ability to vote for who they want."

What charges does Le Pen face?

The RN (formerly known as the National Front) was accused of creating fake jobs between 2004 and 2016, hiring parliamentary assistants to work solely for the party but paying them with EU funds. The employees allegedly included a bodyguard for her and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a graphic designer, and a chief of staff.

Le Pen has so far given "general answers, or said she could not remember" when questioned over how she selected her parliamentary aides and what their tasks were, said The Guardian.

Accusations of the embezzlement scheme, which the French parliament said cost taxpayers millions of euros, first surfaced in 2015. The criminal trial against Le Pen, the party, and other officials, employees, and former politicians, began in September.

If Le Pen is found guilty of the scheme, she is likely to face a prison sentence and a heavy fine. And the prosecution's latest demands throw doubt on whether she would be able to run for office in 2027 – whether or not she decides to appeal the decision.

"Crucially, prosecutors also asked that the sentence be immediately executed," said Politico, "even if Le Pen were to appeal".

What could a guilty verdict mean?

Le Pen has run unsuccessfully for president three times, losing to Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and 2022. But the populist, nationalist RN party has made significant gains in the last several years, and is currently the largest group in the National Assembly. Its leaders are once again optimistic they could clinch the presidency in 2027.

Despite nominating her deputy as the RN candidate last time around, Le Pen has said she intends to be the candidate in 2027. Should she succeed "not only would she be the first hard-right ruler of France since the Vichy regime collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War, but she also would be the first woman to occupy the role of head of state," said The Times. Yet those hopes "would be crushed if she was barred from office, as Barret wants".

Jordan Bardella, the current party head, "would be likely to take her place if she was ruled out of the race". But Bardella "could face competition" from 34-year-old Marion Maréchal, Le Pen's niece, "who has political ambitions herself", said The Times.

What has the response been?

Le Pen and her co-defendants have repeatedly denied all of the accusations brought against them. Le Pen "remains defiant", and maintains that "the work of parliamentary aides included legitimate political activities", said Euronews.

"Drawing a page from United States President-elect Donald Trump’s playbook", Le Pen has consistently characterised the trial as "politically motivated and accused the lead judge of 'biased' conduct", said Politico.

Other RN leaders have also been outspoken on social media, saying the prosecution's demands are disproportionate. In a post on X, Bardella called the demands "an assault on democracy".

French Parliament, on the other hand, "urged that all accused be found guilty" on Tuesday. "It estimated the financial damage to taxpayers at €4.5 million (almost £4 million), and said it would seek an additional €300,000 (almost £250,000) in compensation."

The defence will have the opportunity to present its case before the trial ends on 27 November. A verdict is expected by early next year.

Marine Le Pen, the former leader of France's far-right National Rally (RN), has gone on trial in Paris for allegedly embezzling money from the European Parliament.

She is charged alongside 26 other figures in the party, including several sitting MEPs and her 96-year-old father and party founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in what Le Monde called a "decisive trial in more ways than one".

Le Pen has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. RN spokesperson Laurent Jacobelli said: "We are going to prove that there is no system to embezzle money from the EU."

What is Le Pen accused of? 

It is claimed that between 2004 and 2016, the party – then known as the National Front, prior to a 2018 rebrand – operated a fake jobs scheme, using EU funds to hire parliamentary assistants and using them to work exclusively for the party, the majority of them holding "key positions", reported Politico. It's alleged that many of the assistants were unable to describe their daily work and some had never met their supposed boss or even entered the European Parliament building. Le Monde added that the parliament has estimated around €7 million was misused.

Le Pen, who was the party's president from 2011 to 2021 and an MEP between 2009 and 2017, is accused of employing a parliamentary assistant who actually worked as a bodyguard for her and her father. A secretary, chief of staff and a graphic designer are also said to have been hired under similar false pretences.

In her defence, Le Pen said parliamentary assistants "do not work for the parliament" but were rather "political assistants to elected officials". She added that she assigned tasks according to the person's skills. "Some wrote speeches for me and some handled logistics and coordination," she said.

What will happen if she's found guilty? 

The trial is expected to last around two months, and Le Pen and her co-defendants could be facing a maximum sentence of 10 years behind bars if found guilty, as well as a fine of up to €1 million each.

The party has already paid back €1 million to the European Parliament, of which €330,000 was directly linked to Le Pen's alleged misuse of funds, the AP reported. Lawyers insist this is not an admission of guilt.

How would a guilty verdict affect her political career? 

"The stakes are enormous for the three-time presidential candidate," said Politico, noting that as well as the jail term and fines, Le Pen could face a possible five-year ban on running for public office. That would make her ineligible to stand in the 2027 presidential election, and she has already announced her intention to do so.

Le Pen ran for the presidency in 2012, 2017 and 2022. In 2022 she won 23.2% of the vote in the first round and 41.5% in the run-off with Emmanuel Macron. In July's parliamentary elections, RN took the largest vote share in the first round of voting, but was squeezed out by a left-wing alliance in the final round.

In September, the French website Challenges reported that if a presidential election was called now, Le Pen would be "unshakeable", likely to gain up to 40% of the vote in the first round.

What happened

France's far-right National Rally party won the first round of snap parliamentary elections on Sunday, taking 33% of the votes, the Interior Ministry said Monday. The leftist New Popular Front coalition earned 28%, while President Emmanuel Macron's centrist Ensemble (Together) alliance came in third with 21%. 

Who said what

The "crushing victory" of Marine Le Pen's party brings its "long-taboo brand of nationalist and anti-immigrant politics to the threshold of power for the first time," The New York Times said. 

Le Pen, who lost the presidency to Macron in 2017 and 2022, said French voters had shown a clear "desire to turn the page after seven years of contemptuous and corrosive power." She urged supporters to give her party an absolute majority — at least 298 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly — in the July 7 second round, so her protégé, Jordan Bardella, could become prime minister.

France's two-round voting system has long "functioned as a bulwark against parties from the far ends of the political spectrum, encouraging voters to blow off steam in the first round" before finally electing an "establishment candidate," The Wall Street Journal said. That may not work this time, due mainly to the large number of three-way runoff elections resulting from high voter turnout. 

What next?

The difference between a National Rally majority and plurality in parliament is a "far-right government having a free hand" versus a "far-right government unable to do very much at all," the BBC said. Either way, Macron faces a "difficult three years" until his term ends in 2027, the Times said.

Centrists are "at risk of being squeezed out of the vast majority of second-round run-off places" in France's upcoming parliamentary election.

Recent polls suggest the far-right National Rally and left-wing New Popular Front (NPF) are on course to take a higher vote share than President Emmanuel Macron's centrist alliance in the first round of voting on 30 June, said the Financial Times. Candidates need the backing of at least 12.5% of registered voters in their constituency to advance to the second and final round on 7 July, which means that in many run-off races voters will face a stark choice between right and left.

On the right stands National Rally, led by the charismatic 28-year-old Jordan Bardella. The party has pulled off an impressive rebranding in recent years, distancing itself from a history of openly xenophobic and antisemitic rhetoric to ride the wave of right-wing populism sweeping across Europe.

On the left is NPF, a hastily assembled alliance of France's left-wing parties formed with the explicit mission of keeping National Rally out of power. Its name is a nod to the antifascist alliance that successfully contested the 1936 election.

What did the commentators say?

Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen and now her successor Bardella, National Rally has made significant headway in detoxifying its brand and fine-tuning a populist platform that targets widespread discontent with mainstream parties. However, for many voters, "a modicum of civility has not whitewashed the party’s extreme policies", said Lee Hockstader in The Washington Post.

Female voters could be particularly crucial. Since 2019, National Rally has seen a "12 percentage point increase from women voters", who are now more likely than men to vote for the party – a "striking" reversal of usual voting patterns for far-right parties, said Politico.

On the left, the NPF alliance includes "woo-woo greens" and "traditional opportunistic socialists", but the most powerful faction are the "ultra-leftists" headed by "tantrum-prone Gaza-obsessed Trotskyist" Jean-Luc Mélenchon, said Jonathan Miller in The Spectator. This uneasy alliance has produced a programme of 150 proposals, which are "in totality and individually insane" – from price freezes on essential goods and services to lowering the retirement age to 60.

The pre-war Popular Front, from whom the NPF takes its name, "ended in complete failure and with the occupation of France shortly afterwards". While this time the outcome will not be so disastrous, the most likely scenario remains "a hopelessly divided Assembly".

Macron has justified calling a snap election by suggesting his hand was forced by the extreme factions who "sowed confusion in the Assemblée and polluted public debate", said Solenn de Royer in Le Monde.

The president's gamble was that he would appear the "only reassuring recourse" amid this tumultuous political landscape, yet the reaction to the announcement suggests that Macron instead "comes across as the one who created disorder".

What next?

Recent polls put the NPF at around 28% of the vote, with National Rally on 33%, but "the final outcome in terms of actual seat numbers in the national assembly is hard to judge". said The Guardian. If Macron's centrist candidates fare poorly in the first round, everything depends on where those moderate voters choose to turn in the second round – they could go leftwards, rightwards, or simply stay at home.

Whether France goes left or right, the real casualty of the election is the broader notion that the political centre represents a stabilising influence – a shift that can only further empower the nation's political extremists. On a visit to the island of Sein off the coast of Brittany earlier this week, Macron was intercepted by a voter who doubtless spoke for many when she asked: "Mr President, how can you have put us in this situation? How can you have put us in this chaos?"

A moment of reckoning in France: President Emmanuel Macron dissolved his country's parliament and called for snap elections after French far-right groups made significant gains in the European Union elections, said the BBC. "I have heard your message," the president told French voters, "and I will not let it go without a response." Macron's "dramatic and surprise decision" to call the election could open the way for Marine Le Pen's anti-migrant National Rally party to take power — and to make Le Pen herself France's new prime minister.

The elections are a "huge gamble," said The New York Times. "It is a huge risk from an impetuous man who prefers taking the initiative to being subjected to events," said one observer. Macron is asking his country's voters what they meant by their pro-right EU votes: "Were the French letting off steam, or did they really mean it?" They might mean it, Politico said. "At no point in history has the National Rally appeared closer to power." With hard-right parties making gains across Europe, "yesterday's truths are no longer guaranteed in today's new political reality."

'We are the stakes'

The effort to make the National Rally more acceptable to French voters is led by 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, CNN said. He was hand-picked in 2022 by Le Pen to lead the party and has worked to rid it "of its antisemitic and racist overtones" while retaining its populist rhetoric. "We will act by expelling delinquents, criminals and foreign Islamists who pose a threat to national security," Bardella said. His efforts are proof that "what was once unpalatable and reserved to the fringes of French politics is now normalized and entrenched in the mainstream." 

The first round of elections takes place on June 30, giving France "three weeks to avoid the worst," Jérôme Fenoglio said at Le Monde. Journalists keep using gambling terms to describe Macron's gambit, and deservedly so. "The problem is that we are the stakes." Macron has long tried to reduce the allure of the far-right in France — but he did so without implementing actual policies that get at the roots of concerns about migration, the climate transition and other issues that have powered National Rally's rise. Now an inflection point is at hand. "Nothing less than the future of our democracy will be decided."

Alliances, made and unmade

An early sign of trouble for Macron: France's other parties have rejected his bid to form an alliance against National Rally, Financial Times said. He made a "public pitch" to an array of parties —  the Socialists and the Greens, as well as the center-right Republicans — on Sunday. "But his potential allies have so far rejected his offer." Instead, Reuters said, Republicans leader Eric Ciotti has called for an alliance with National Rally. "This is what the vast majority of our voters want," Ciotti said. "They tell us 'reach a deal'." That means a "decades-old consensus" to keep the far right out of power has effectively ended.

So the snap elections could upend everything we've come to know about French politics. A new poll shows National Rally leading with 34%, Bloomberg said — nearly twice the 19% of Macron's ruling Renaissance party. The two rounds of votes take place on June 30 and July 7.

French President Emmanuel Macron has called snap parliamentary elections after a victory for Marine Le Pen's National Rally in the European Parliament vote. 

It won 31.5% of the vote, more than double the share that went to Macron's centrist party. Exit polls had begun to roll in when Macron delivered his "bombshell moment" to the French population, said the BBC.

The "Paris commentariat" had thought he would shrug off the result as an "aberration", said the BBC, and trust that the upcoming Olympics and European football championships would distract from politics. But Macron said he could not "pretend nothing had happened", said Sky News, and admitted the EU election was "no good" for his government. 

The snap elections are a "massive gamble", said Euronews. Macron has already lost his absolute majority in the national assembly after being re-elected two years ago.

Le Pen and National Rally president Jordan Bardella "sought to frame the EU election as a mid-term referendum on Mr Macron's mandate, tapping into discontent with immigration, crime and a two-year inflation crisis", said The Telegraph.

If National Rally wins a majority, Macron will be "left as a lame duck" until his term ends in 2027.

The first round of elections for the national assembly will take place on 30 June and the second on 7 July, a few weeks before the Paris Olympics.

Analysts told The Guardian that a National Rally majority was "unlikely", in part because European elections are seen by voters as a "low-cost way of delivering a kick to the incumbent government" and things "may well turn out differently in a local parliamentary election".

Macron is trying to "make the best of his weak position by reclaiming the initiative" and forcing National Rally "into election mode faster than it would have liked". But the "unexpected decision" is a "roll of the dice" on his political future.

European voters "may be about to elect their most right-wing parliament in history," said CNBC. Voters in 27 nations this week will choose 720 members for five-year terms in the EU Parliament — and as with much of the rest of the world, the results are expected to reflect a surge of nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment on the continent. The parliament has traditionally "been led by a strong majority of centrist parties," but expected gains for parties that include Italy's Giorgia Meloni and France's Marine Le Pen "have thrown this balance into question."

"The young adults now gravitating to far right aren't Nazis or xenophobic racists," Paul Hockenos said at Foreign Policy. But they are discontented with the continent's shaky post-pandemic economy. Polls show that means those young voters are abandoning left-wing outfits like the Green Party in favor of identity-driven groups like Germany's AfD. "The system still doesn't work for them," said one political scientist, "so let the other guys have a try." 

What did the commentators say?

The expected far-right surge means "the next European parliament will be more polarized and fragmented than ever," Ivan Krastev said at Financial Times. But newly empowered right-wing groups may only push their luck so far. "Many on Europe's far right today have been shaped by the failure of Brexit," and are haunted by "being forced to deliver on their radical promises." And infighting may limit their effectiveness: Meloni and Le Pen's EU parties have not been able to present a unified bloc. That is one more sign of "how hard it would be to house all the continent's rightwing radicals under one roof."

Some observers are less sanguine. "I'm a brown, Muslim European," Shada Islam said at The Guardian. "For people like me, these EU elections are terrifying." The far-right parties — even if they have put on friendlier faces — are still backed by "unashamedly racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic" politicians. "This is a sad and sobering moment for all progressive Europeans."

What next?

The elections come as Russia and Ukraine fight Europe's biggest war since World War II and could "test the durability of the Western coalition that is backing Ukraine against Russian aggression," said the Council on Foreign Relations. One sign of the stakes: EU officials say Russia is behind a disinformation campaign targeting the elections. "Before with trolls and bots, there was usually a person behind it," one researcher told Reuters. "With AI, everything has multiplied."

The election will quickly present EU President Ursula von der Leyen with a tricky question. She will need 361 votes from the Parliament to secure another term but may not be able to get there without support from one of the far-right parties. Italy's Meloni is already presenting herself as a kingmaker. It is not clear, though, that von der Leyen can make a deal while also keeping together what is left of her existing coalition. She "has signaled that she may look for allies on the hard right to gather enough votes," said The New York Times. "But such a move would risk alienating center-left forces on which she has also depended."

On 6 June 373 million people from 27 countries will go to the polls in the European Parliament elections with the effects of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and an increase in illegal migration high up in voters' minds. 

The situation on the continent means many voters will shift away from liberal and centre-left parties, with the "centre-right, ultraconservative and far-right" parties "leading the polls in the main EU countries", said Euronews.

Here are five things to look out for in the upcoming elections.

A shift to the right

There is strong evidence that right-wing parties will enjoy much success at the polls, particularly with far-right parties having already "won elections in Italy and the Netherlands" and currently leading "the polls in France, Austria and Belgium", said the BBC. Some analysts suggest they could gain "more than three in every 10 votes" and become a "powerful force" in the European Parliament.

However, their success once elected could require cooperation between the two main right-wing groups of parties, the Identity and Democracy (ID) group and the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). If they can "overcome their internal differences", they could "form a powerful bloc" that could have significant influence in parliament.

Giorgia Meloni

Much of the focus on potential alliances after the elections is centred on Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, "Europe’s most prominent far-right leader", said Politico.

Meloni's Brothers of Italy party is expected to do well in the elections, and in anticipation the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has already made offers to "form a right-wing super group" in the European Parliament between Le Pen's ID group and Meloni's ECR.

But the Italian is also concerning  European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. An alliance between Le Pen and Meloni's groups would be "less than ideal" for Von der Leyen's centre-right European People's Party (EPP), who are expected to win the most seats again.

The EPP has not "ruled out a coalition" with Meloni, but the Italian prime minister has so far kept "her cards close to her chest" and has "left all options on the table among parties on the right", having found herself in a position of considerable strategic importance.

The youth vote

The 2019 elections saw a 25-year high turnout of 50.6%, largely driven by "an increase in voting among young people", said The Guardian. Young voters are still less likely to turn out than older generations, however, and the EU has launched campaigns to try to "mobilise young voters".

But a higher turnout among the younger generation does not necessarily spell greater success for liberal parties or the centre-left, nor "support for the European project or flagship policies". Instead, many young voters are "veering toward newer parties, which include far-right platforms", said Politico. This was evidenced by results in the Netherlands and Portugal, where anti-immigration campaigns played on young people's housing and "quality-of-life concerns".

That could play out similarly in the European elections, although the youth vote still tilts towards the left in some countries, such as Italy.

Left-wing splits

While the left is looking likely to lose influence in the European Parliament, there are some who are attempting to form alliances to "snatch populist votes" away from the right, said Euronews. 

The "rising 'left-conservative'" German party Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) could become the "largest delegation to the left of the Greens" after the elections, said Euractiv. The party has already said it has "rallied enough partners to launch a new left-wing group".

If true, that is likely to cause significant splits on the left of parliament, with the BSW's "ideological positioning" seen as "controversial" among some established parties, which view it as right-leaning.

A number of "leading left-wing parties" have already "ruled out alliances" with far-right parties in anticipation of significant gains in the elections by "hardline nationalists", said The Guardian.

Politically weakened leaders

As a "new cast of European leaders is looking to step up as power brokers", some of those established in power may be seeing the beginning of the end of their influence, said Politico. French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz are looking "politically weakened" domestically already, and the chance that the "election could be a rout" will only exacerbate their positions.

The failure of the "Franco-German engine" could also have an impact on the EU's "top jobs", with Macron and Scholz yet to align on who they are backing for the European Commission president. Even when they do "manage to see eye-to-eye", they struggle to "have others follow" their lead and poor election results will only make it clearer that "Europe isn't sure these two should be in charge anymore".

Emmanuel Macron hopes to re-set his flagging presidency by appointing the youngest-ever and first openly gay prime minister in French history.

The French president is seeking to "rejuvenate his troubled second term after facing mass protests against a pensions reform last year and bitter dissensions within his own camp over an immigration bill which left his governing coalition badly bruised", Politico reported.

The 34-year-old Gabriel Attal will be charged, first and foremost, with ensuring that centrist forces overcome the far-right, in European elections in June and then in presidential polls in 2027.

What the papers said

"A child of Paris's elite circles", Attal "arrives with significant political experience despite his youth," said Victor Goury-Laffont on Politico.

A consultant by profession, the new prime minister comes from a wealthy family in the capital's south and was educated at the exclusive schools and universities that groom the French governing class. He was an early defector to Macron's En Marche! party in 2017 and rose quickly from government spokesperson and junior minister, then "broke through to stardom" when he took over the Education Ministry five months ago, said The Times.

"Gabriel saw straight away the modernity that Macron's election could bring," Hervé Marseille, a French senator, told the Financial Times. "Attal is an extension of that movement – a baby Macron." 

Unlike his predecessor, the "bloodless" Elisabeth Borne, said The Spectator, Attal is "comfortable in front of a camera and is a polished communicator". His is a more "combative style", agreed France 24, and "despite his relative inexperience, he has earned a reputation as a firm and decisive figure".

Policies pushed by Attal during his relatively short tenure at the Education Ministry included a ban on abayas, the long robes worn by some Muslim women, in schools; bypassing parental approval to hold students back a year; measures to increase the difficulty level of standardised tests; a new civic service for teenagers; and trials for compulsory uniforms in schools.

These have won him the admiration of conservatives, whose support Macron needs to push through legislation, and – along with his openness about the homophobic and antisemitic bullying he suffered in his youth – made him the most popular politician in France, according to an Ipsos poll released in December.

What next?

The move "was a risky and surprising choice by Macron", said the FT, and one that he may come to regret if Attal "overshadows him in the waning years of the president's second term". 

But "an appeal to the right is vital for Macron", said The Times, especially given the rising tide of support for Marine Le Pen and her party with the European elections and then the presidential election on the horizon for 2027.

Macron currently holds a lowly 30% approval rating according to aggregated polls, reported Politico, and his coalition trails Le Pen's National Rally by about 10 points in European election polling.

With Islamic extremism, the economy, immigration, insecurity and violent crime top of the agenda, Macron "wants Attal to rein in the right, but there is a growing feeling in France that Le Pen's party are unstoppable", said The Spectator, which added that Attal "has youth on his side, but he hasn't got time".

The conservative Le Figaro thinks Attal's appointment will do little to arrest the drift of the Macron administration. "Changing one face at the top does nothing to change the overall picture," the paper remarked.

"This scepticism is shared by many on the left," said The Spectator.

As the president's nominee, "he is the wunderkind's wunderkind", said the BBC's correspondent in Paris, Hugh Schofield. "But if he is only Macron's mini-me, the marvel could prove a mirage."

In an interview on Monday night, before Attal was named as PM, the MEP Raphaël Glucksmann joked that he already knew who the holder of the title would be. "It's Emmanuel Macron!" said Glucksmann. "And the foreign minister will also be Emmanuel Macron, as will the defence minister and the culture minister."

Therein lies the problem for Macron. He has so dominated French politics since he emerged out of nowhere to win the presidency in 2017 – in the process completely re-shaping the political map – that the traditional function of prime ministers "to shield the president by taking the political heat while executing his orders", according to The Times, has been weakened.

Ultimately, the fortunes of Macron's presidency – and the centre in France – will be tied to him, not his prime minister.

Major cities across France have erupted in protest and riots in recent weeks after President Emmanuel Macron pushed a highly controversial reform of the pension system through parliament, leaving many political analysts speculating that France may be about to lurch dramatically right or left come the next election.

Barred by the French constitution from campaigning for a third term, Macron will bow out in 2027, creating “a power vacuum” that leaders from across the political spectrum will be “itching to fill”, said Politico, among them the three-time presidential contender Marine Le Pen.

Certainly the 54-year-old leader of the right-wing populist Rassemblement National (RN) has been in a “cheerful mood” recently, said Spiegel International, speaking confidently about her electoral chances.

Addressing journalists this week, Le Pen said: “And when I become president of the republic, I will replace this reform with our pension reform. And it will be a fair reform.”

What did the papers say?

Campaigning for re-election to the presidency last year, Macron pledged to address the major criticism levelled at him throughout his first term that he was “an authoritarian president who acted alone”, said French journalist Marion Van Renterghem in the New European. His slogans at the second outing were “Nous tous” (“We all”) and “Avec vous” (“With you”).

Yet less than a year into his new term, Macron has pushed through hugely unpopular pension reforms via the “ultimate political sin”, according to Van Renterghem, of utilising Article 49.3 of the constitution, which allows the president to act without parliamentary approval.

The upshot, said Van Renterghem, is that French democracy “has run out of steam” and it is the far right and the far left who are “benefiting the most from the shambles.”

“Chillingly, the party that is staying calm and waiting for a wave of disaffected militants to join them is Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National,” she added.

Despite having been beaten twice in run-offs for the Élysée Palace, Le Pen “has enhanced her stature as France’s president-in-waiting”, agreed The Times.

The key to her success has been her work in detoxifying her party’s image, said Politico, primarily by “ditching the ‘National Front’ party name that was associated with her Holocaust-minimising father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, but also by “placing [herself] at the centre of the action against the pension reform”.

And while she hasn’t yet announced her candidacy, Édouard Philippe, who served as Macron’s first prime minister, said Le Pen is now the clear favourite to win the next presidential election in 2027. Since losing to Macron last year, “she has pulled ahead with her normalisation”, Philippe said.

What next?

What happens next “is hard to predict”, said Sky News. Macron “will be hoping the wave of protests fades but it’s also possible the chaos of protests and strikes gains even greater momentum and carries on for months”.

Electorally speaking, Macron’s pension reforms are doing harm not only to his own party, but to all centrists in France, said Foreign Policy.

“By potentially turbocharging more extremist views – far-right leader Marine Le Pen is the biggest political beneficiary of the popular fury at Macron – the pension fight might also undermine centrist parties like Macron’s in the European Parliament, which is due to hold elections next year,” the magazine said.

According to the latest polls, Le Pen is the figure that best embodies the opposition to Macron’s reforms, closely followed by leftist firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon. More than 60% of those surveyed believe Le Pen is emerging from this crisis stronger than before.

With his unpopular reforms, Macron has “lit a fire and blocked all the exits”, quipped Mélenchon this week.

Some have speculated that Le Pen’s previous failed presidential bids may have damaged her future electoral chances, but this analysis is flawed, said The Times.

Le Pen has “no rivals of her political stature” and so is in “a strong position to follow in the footsteps of France’s two most popular presidents since Charles de Gaulle: François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac”, the paper said.

EU leaders rushed to congratulate Emmanuel Macron after he beat far-right leader Marine Le Pen to secure a second term in office in France’s presidential elections in April.

The Europe-wide support for Macron reflected “relief that one of the bloc’s pivotal countries had avoided a political shock”, said Reuters. Le Pen’s “potentially explosive social and economic reforms” had triggered alarm, with analysts and diplomats warning of “huge implications for the stability of the EU” if the “deeply eurosceptic” far-right leader became president.

But while Macron held on to the top job, his centrist Ensemble coalition “suffered a massive political defeat” in legislative elections earlier this month, said the i news site’s Leo Cendrowicz. A “surge in support for hard left and extreme right” left Macron “well short of the absolute majority needed to control parliament”.

Le Pen’s National Rally “scored a historic success” by increasing its number of deputies in the National Assembly's lower house from eight to 89, “cementing the party’s rise from fringe status to mainstream opposition”, said Reuters’ Paris-based correspondent John Irish. The result sent “shockwaves” through France – and could have significant implications across the EU too.

France, the EU and the far-right

France was a founding member of the EU, and with the second-largest economy in the bloc, “French leadership matters hugely to the future of the European project”, said Susi Dennison and Tara Varma of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

France is “half of the vital Franco-German engine” that has “powered” the EU “since its creation”, said The Guardian. In fact, Macron is arguably “succeeding” Germany’s former chancellor Angela Merkel “as the European Union’s de-facto leader”, said Voa News.

Le Pen, by contrast,has “flirted with the idea” of leaving the EU since being elected to take over from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, as National Rally’s leader in 2011, said Reuters.

During her second presidential bid, in 2017, she campaigned for “Frexit”, but was hobbled by voters’ “fear of the economic consequences of that policy”, said The Guardian.

Le Pen subsequently softened her anti-EU stance, telling voters on the campaign trail this year that Frexit was no longer her “objective”. Yet many of her plans for the French economy, social policy and immigration implied “breaking the EU’s rules”, the paper added.

Mutjaba Rahman, a former economist at the UK Treasury and European Commission, tweeted ahead of the April election that Le Pen was essentially offering “a policy of Frexit which does not speak its name”.

Still a risk?

Despite the “sighs of relief” following Macron’s recent presidency victory, “more than half of French voters supported candidates in the first round of the election who are critical of the EU”, said Reuters.

So should the bloc be worried by the rise in support for the National Rally? Could the election results bolster nationalist parties across the EU? And what are the chances of a future Frexit?

In this episode of The Overview, The Week shares insights from guest experts Dr Andrew Smith, reader in contemporary history and politics at the University of Chichester, Georgina Wright, senior fellow and director of the Institut Montaigne think-tank’s Europe programme, and Ivan Krastev, political scientist at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

French voters cast ballots on Sunday in the first round of their country's parliamentary elections, and the results suggest to some pollsters that the coalition supporting newly re-elected President Emmanuel Macron could be in danger of losing its majority in the National Assembly.

Voter turnout was around 47 percent, the lowest participation rate since the French Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.

According to France's interior ministry, Macron's alliance, Ensemble, received 5,857,561 votes — 25.75 percent — barely edging out Mélenchon's New Ecologic and Social People's Union, which received 5,836,202 votes, or 25.66 percent.

Other top vote-getters were Marine Le Pen's right-wing National Rally (18.68 percent), the center-right Republicans (10.42 percent), and Éric Zemmour's far-right Reconquest (4.24 percent). Zemmour himself failed to finish in the top two in the constituency for which he ran, and will not advance to the second round, which will take place on June 12.

Macron's allies currently hold 346 of the National Assembly's 577 seats. Polling firm Ipsos predicts Ensemble will win the greatest number of seats, between 255 and 295. This range straddles the 289 seats required for an absolute majority. If Macron's alliance falls below that number, his ability to govern will be severely hindered.

1. Four in 10 French voters wanting to make a neo-fascist their president is no cause for celebration

Sean O’Grady for The Independent

on a divided country

Emmanuel Macron has beaten Marine Le Pen to remain president of France, but “it’s premature to dance on the grave of French neo-fascism”, writes Sean O’Grady at The Independent. Le Pen “won the highest vote of any such candidate in French modern history” and so “we have to process and accept the fact that she is popular”. As the “proud heiress of her father’s antisemitic ideology, the Vichy regime, and various crackpot sects over the decades”, Le Pen is “a woman who wanted to ban Muslim people from wearing culturally harmless headgear, and much else”. Yet, “faced with a liberal man of the centre, she commanded the support of more than four in ten French voters”. The “traditional mainstream parties of the left and Gaullist right have been smashed”, with “no signs of them recovering”, concludes O’Grady. With Macron unable to stand for president again, “the next campaign to save France should start today”.

Read more

2. Biden’s decline is obvious to everyone but the press

Karol Markowicz for the New York Post

on a question of acumen

“Something is wrong with President Joe Biden, and everyone knows it,” writes Karol Markowicz. Last week, she says, he started “rambling” when he was asked about a pandemic immigration restriction and it “turned out he was talking about mask mandates on airplanes”. This isn’t “simply misspeaking”, Markowicz writes. “He seems fully out of it, and we’re all watching quietly.” After touching on other moments of awkwardness for Biden, she asks: “Is the president OK? He doesn’t seem like it.” During the Trump reign, the president’s acumen was “full-on debated and often”, says the New York Post columnist, “but now we’re supposed to disregard what we see with our own eyes”. Many of us have had our “own confused grandpa”, who is “starting one story and finishing another or rambling from one topic to the next nonsensically”, she writes. “The trouble is this confused grandpa has a bit more power than your own.”

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3. Why the Tories can’t replace Boris with a Remainer

Patrick O’Flynn in The Specator

on a political deathwish

Jeremy Hunt has “assumed the mantle of favourite” to take over if and when Boris Johnson is moved on, writes Patrick O’Flynn, but this could be a “deathwish” for the Tory Party. “Imagine the smart and smooth Jeremy on a stool next to smart and smooth Keir, also from Surrey, and Ed, the wannabe-smoothie MP for Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey.” The Spectator writer says that “peas in a pod comes to mind, and eminently forgettable ones at that”. All three “energetically” backed Remain and appear to have no worries about the impact of immigration on social cohesion and access to public services. O’Flynn imagines Red Wall voters will be unimpressed if the Tories “dump the charismatic figure who won them over and present them instead with an identikit ‘liberal’ Conservative of the sort that had never won them over in the first place – a lower wattage version of David Cameron”.

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4. Angela Rayner’s treatment shows that Westminster’s women are still treated as objects of sexual speculation

Kate Maltby for The i

on crass bait

“We all know how unhealthy cycles of outrage on social media can be,” says Kate Maltby, writing about the claim that Angela Rayner crosses and uncrosses her legs to distract Boris Johnson. “So why did so many women working in Westminster – myself included – rise this weekend to a crass bit of bait?” The i columnist explains that “the answer is that women in Westminster… are sick of working in an environment where they are routinely reduced to objects of sexual speculation”. She adds that “walking into the House of Commons still feels like entering a 70s time-warp” because “the comments made about women’s bodies – and about people of colour, or LGBT+ people – would have HR down on you like a ton of bricks in any other workplace”. Turning her fire on the newspaper that published the claims about Rayner, Maltby says: “Women in our highest political assembly are more than their bodies – time the Mail on Sunday caught up.”

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5. WhatsApp is ruining our lives

Lucy Burton in The Telegraph

on constant chatter

“We all know we should spend less time on our phones, but few of us do it,” writes Lucy Burton. Screen use has increased since the pandemic, with 54% of UK adults now using their screens more regularly, and employers are becoming “aggravated” that “more and more of their customers and staff are becoming phone zombies”. For Burton, the employment editor of The Telegraph, WhatsApp is a particular culprit. A pub boss told her he is considering imposing a formal ban on staff WhatsApp group chats outside of certain hours, and members of a major teaching union said late-night WhatsApp messages from headteachers were “grinding down” morale. Meanwhile, she writes, bosses fear bankers can “too easily share potentially sensitive work information via the app” and a report from the Institute for Government said Whitehall “needs to ‘get a grip’ on how WhatsApp was being used by ministers”. She writes that “businesses and individuals have clocked that our addiction to our phones and the instant, constant chatter inside them has come at a cost” and that “we have reached peak WhatsApp”. The movement away from “excessive use” will “only get stronger from here on in”, she writes.

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Liberals across the Western world are rejoicing at the news that incumbent Emmanuel Macron roundly defeated the right-wing antiliberal candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round of France's presidential election on Sunday.

The celebration is warranted. Macron didn't just win. He won by nearly 17 points — 58.3 to 41.6 percent — a popular-vote margin wider than any seen in a U.S. presidential election since Ronald Reagan won re-election in a landslide nearly 40 years ago. That's a decisive victory for the center and a resounding defeat for its opponents.

But that doesn't mean complacency is in order. On the contrary, when the election results are placed in the broader historical context, it's clear that the battle in France between liberals and antiliberals, center and periphery, is far from over. Indeed, if recent trends continue, the likelihood of a defeat for the center and triumph of the antiliberal right or left will continue to rise, with one of the extremes running a good chance of prevailing in the coming years.

Consider: When Marine Le Pen's father Jean-Marie Le Pen, the long-time ultranationalist head of the far-right National Front (FN), made it into the second round back in 2002, he was crushed by the center-right Jacques Chirac 82.2 to 18.8 percent. Fifteen years later, with the FN now led by the younger Le Pen, the result was another decisive loss, 66.1 to 33.9 percent, this time to Macron, who was leading a newly formed En Marche party of neoliberal centrism. Macron won his victory by turning the election into an all-hands-on-deck referendum on the fate of fascism in France, with voters from across the spectrum urged to cast an anti-Le Pen vote in favor of himself.

Between 2017 and 2022, Le Pen changed the name of her party (it's now called National Rally) and worked to stake out somewhat more moderate positions on issues. The result in the first-round vote on April 10 was a plurality for Macron with 27.9 percent and a second-place showing for Le Pen at 23.2 percent, 1.9 points higher than her first-round result five years earlier.

But that wasn't the only shift away from the center. A candidate even further to the right, xenophobic firebrand Éric Zemmour, won 7 percent, while the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon came in third, with 22 percent. Add in the combined 5 percent won by the French communists and Résistons, a small ruralist and social conservative party, and that's a total of 57.2 percent voting for parties sharply opposed to the political center.

In the two-week run-up to the second-round vote, Macron attempted the same emergency move that brought him to victory five years ago, calling on the French nation to unite in opposition to the threat of extremism. It worked again, though this time with Le Pen finishing 7.7 points higher than she did in 2017.

Has the far-right now hit a ceiling of support that will keep it out of the presidential palace over the long term? Or might its strength continue to grow between now and the next election in 2027?

The liberal center has three reasons to worry.

For one thing, Macron is precluded from running for a third term — and his En Marche party is more a personal brand than a real party with deep roots in the French electorate. It's possible and maybe even likely that it will fizzle without Macron running as its standard bearer.

Then there's the fate of France's traditional center-left and center-right parties. The Socialists and Republicans (and their differently named predecessors) passed the presidency between them for decades, with the two regularly winning a combined total of 50 percent of the vote in the first round of elections. But in this year's first round, the two together pulled in just 7 percent — an extraordinary collapse in support. (That's a huge drop from their combined first-round showing in 2017 of 26.4 percent, which was itself historically low.)

That could leave a rather large hole at the center of the political spectrum five years from now.

Finally, there are demographics. Two weeks ago, the far-left Mélenchon won voters aged 18-34, while Le Pen did best in the 35-59 age range. Macron's support, by contrast, came largely from voters 60 and older, while he finished a distant third among voters aged 18-34. That points to a future of declining centrism and ascendent antiliberalism.

Nothing is certain, of course. Five years is an eternity in politics, and plenty can change in that time. But at the moment, the trends are clear. Now imagine Le Pen's base of support uniting behind someone with a less politically toxic last name just as frustration is growing among the youthful supporters of the far left about their failure to dislodge the centrist establishment. In such a situation, would it be possible to persuade the left, for the third election in a row, to throw its support behind a neoliberal option in order to prevent the victory of a far-right candidate?

At the moment, there's no way to know. But I, for one, wouldn't bet on it.

That doesn't mean the liberal center is doomed in French politics. But it does mean that it faces an opposition far more formidable than anything it's confronted in quite some time — and that this new era of high-stakes ideological contestation might really be the new normal, in France as well as elsewhere.

Emmanuel Macron has vowed to unite France after becoming the country’s first president in 20 years to win re-election.

Addressing a rally at the foot of the Eiffel Tower following his victory over Marine Le Pen yesterday, Macron vowed to be “the president of all of us” and to respond “efficiently” to the “anger and disagreement” of voters who backed his rival.

“I know that a number of French people have voted for me today, not to support my ideas but to stop the ideas of the far-right,” he said.

Divided Republic

Macron picked up 58.54% of the vote in Sunday’s second-round run-off, comfortably beating Le Pen, on 41.46%. But his National Rally rival “nonetheless won more than 13 million votes in a historic high for her anti-immigration party”, wrote The Guardian’s Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis.

“Before the caveats,” said BBC’s correspondent Hugh Schofield, “it is only fair to acknowledge the scale of Macron’s achievement.” The election marks “the first time ever that a governing president of the Fifth Republic has been re-elected”.

And while former presidents “have retained the Elysée before”, Macron is the first in modern times to win a second term since Jacques Chirac was elected back into the top job in 2002. “Which when you consider France’s long-standing relationship with government – which is essentially to cheer ‘em in, then chuck ‘em out at the first opportunity – is no mean feat,” Schofield continued.

The result of yesterday’s vote there are “millions of French people of the middling type who feel that Macron has not been at all a bad president”. But Le Pen’s record vote tally also shows “people in France are now prepared to dally with the ‘extremes’”, added Schofield.

The victorious leader of the centrist Le Marche! (On the March!) party has called for unity, urging his supporters to be kind and respectful” to Le Pen voters amid the clear “division” in French society.

But despite that plea, the vote result triggered violence in cities across France. Police used tear gas to disperse gatherings in Paris, Lyon and Rennes after “several hundred demonstrators from ultra-left groups took to the streets” to protest “Macron’s re-election and Le Pen’s score”, said The Guardian’s Chrisafis.

“There was a large police presence in central Paris hours after the election win, after police opened fire on a car, killing two people inside,” she reported. Whether the incident was linked to the election was unclear.

Healing wounds

Macron may be expected to “toe a more cautious line” following his second victory, said The Telegraph’s correspondent Henry Samuel. The centrist politician is presiding over a country “reeling from successive Yellow Vest revolts, Covid lockdowns and the war in Ukraine”.

As he heads into his second term, he faces further challenges including maintaining the “Franco-Germany engine” that powers the EU; combating “rising living costs”; overseeing his “controversial” pensions reform; and delivering on a pledge to foster “participative democracy” made during the Yellow Vest protests.

Le Pen’s “powerful showing” could “spell trouble” for the under-pressure president, Politico said, and will serve as a “warning shot to Nato and the European Union”.

Even “in one of the EU’s founding countries”, Macron’s best efforts could not stop millions voting for a figure “whose campaign platform advocates dismantling the EU from within by suspending its free-travel rules and downgrading the supremacy of EU law”.

“The most immediate challenge” for Macron, said the site, is leading a “deeply divided country where political anger could easily boil over into street protests and violence”.

All the same, said Sky News’ international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn, Macron’s vote victory will have triggered “sighs of relief across Europe”.

While his “defeat would have led to a seismic shift in world affairs”, Waghorn continued, his historic second term “means the status quo of the last five years goes on”, with France and Germany at “the spine of Europe” and Macron maintaining his “prominent role leading Europe diplomatically”.

However, “the grievances laid bare” by Le Pen’s vote tally “may force him to focus his energies more on domestic issues as he tries to heal the deep divisions exposed during this campaign”.

Warning signs

The result of the election marks “a personal victory for Macron, who has only run for election twice in his life: each time for the presidency, and each time with success”, The Economist said. “But it also carries warnings.”

He “has now kept the forces of populism out of France’s highest office twice”, a feat for which “history will judge him well”. But “the second-term president now has his work cut out if he is to renew the appeal of liberal politics, and reverse the steadily growing success of the extremes”, the paper added.

Macron “will no doubt start this second term promising a new kind of government”, said the BBC’s Schofield. “He’ll be more of a listener. He knows there are wounds that need to heal.”

But another key problem that Macron faces is that “he has said that kind of thing before, and a lot of people simply don’t believe him”.

The president’s European allies are also likely to be “worried by the deep-seated anger and divisions exposed in this election and concerned by the steadily improving fortunes of the far-right in France”, said Sky News’s Waghorn.

So if Macron now has to “spends less time on the world stage now and more time healing his country’s domestic politics”, they will surely “not begrudge his absence”.

Centrist French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday became the first French president in 20 years to win a second term, defeating right-wing challenger Marine Le Pen by a margin of around 16 percentage points, The New York Times reports.

Early projections, which the Times notes are "generally reliable," show Macron with 58.2 percent of the vote to Le Pen's 41.8 percent.

Le Pen, who strove throughout the campaign to soften her image as a far-right extremist, improved considerably on her performance in 2017, when Macron trounced her 66–34. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, suffered an even more dramatic loss in 2002, when incumbent center-right President Jacques Chirac defeated him 82–18.

Roger Cohen of The New York Times argued that Marine Le Pen's performance on Sunday indicates that her National Rally Party has now "joined the mainstream, ending the taboo that held that defense of the Republic meant keeping the far right at the margins."

As France's political margins have moved toward the mainstream, the two parties that previously occupied the mainstream have receded to the margins. France's center-right party — Les Républicains — received less than 5 percent of the vote in the first round. France's center-left Socialist Party performed even worse, netting less than 2 percent of the first-round vote.

Centrist French President Emmanuel Macron led right-wing challenger Marine Le Pen by around 10 points in final polling averages on Friday as campaigning ended ahead of Sunday's runoff election, The Washington Post reported.

Macron — who defeated Le Pen by a wide margin in 2017 and is seeking to become the first French president in 20 years to win a second term — said the election is "a referendum on the future of France." Le Pen has accused the incumbent of being arrogant and aloof. "It's Macron or France," she told voters, according to BBC. French law required that all campaigning cease at midnight on Friday.

On Wednesday, the two candidates faced off in a debate in which Macron sought to tie his opponent to Russian President Vladimir Putin and interrupted her repeatedly. French journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet told The Week after the debate that she "came out of this [debate]" feeling frustrated with both candidates and "thinking, 'I don't want to hear from these two again.'" She also predicted "record abstention" on Sunday.

According to the Post, "a Le Pen upset victory still remains a possibility," and "turnout could play a critical role in Sunday's vote."

Marine Le Pen is hoping that it's third time lucky after sneaking through the first round of France’s presidential election.

The far-right National Rally leader came second in the first round, winning 23.1% of the vote. She edged out hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon (22%), setting up a rerun of the 2017 vote in which Macron stormed to his first term in the Élysée Palace.

Le Pen has run a campaign offering voters a “traditional hard line on immigration and French identity”, France 24 reported, while wooing “struggling households” with support including a cut in taxes on petrol and rises in pension payouts.

Often dismissed by mainstream voters as an extremist, Le Pen has worked hard to detoxify her image, telling a rally in Perpignan, southern France, this week: “Our programme is a social one because it completely takes into account the questions of daily life, above all the cost of living.” So what would a Le Pen presidency look like?

Home front

Le Pen has pledged to “restore France’s sovereignty”, the i news site reported, promising “a referendum on restricting immigration” and a ban on women “wearing the Muslim hijab in public areas”. In an effort to avoid “constitutional challenges” to her manifesto, she has said she will “use referendums on many of her proposed laws”.

A longstanding Eurosceptic, Le Pen has pledged to “cut contributions to the EU”, the news site said, while arguing that “French law should prevail over EU rules”. This has allowed Macron to present the vote as a “referendum on Europe”, The Telegraph reported.

Addressing a crowd in Strasbourg, the French seat of the European parliament, the incumbent on Tuesday said: “Europe is what protects us from crises and war. The far-right’s project is a project to leave the Council of Europe.”

Le Pen “has abandoned earlier plans to leave the euro and pay France’s debt in newly created francs”, Reuters reported. But on the economic front, she has refashioned her previously “free-market, small-government party” into a “big-spending” and “protectionist” force.

She has advocated for a “Buy French” policy for public tenders, backed “scrapping income tax” for under-30s and promised to “cut VAT on energy to 5.5% from 20%”, the news agency said. Her party will also spend “two billion euros (£1.68bn) over five years raising hospital workers’ salaries”. Teachers’ pay would also be boosted.

In an effort to keep her traditional conservative voters onside with her big spending plans, Le Pen is also offering “more tax cuts for companies”, France 24 reported.

Looking abroad

Macron winning the majority of the votes in the first round marked “a moment of relief for policymakers across the EU and Nato”, said the Financial Times’s (FT) European diplomatic correspondent Henry Foy.

The French president has accused Le Pen of having a secret plan for “Frexit”, The Times reported, despite her tempering her public opposition to EU membership.

Le Pen has also threatened to “pull France out of transatlantic military alliance Nato’s integrated command”, Reuters said, a move that would present a major “challenge to the West’s post-Cold War security architecture”.

Meanwhile, said the FT’s Foy, her “populist economic views on state aid and the lowering of domestic taxes on consumer goods would break EU free market regulations”. And she would “likely derail the Franco-German relationship that has defined much of recent EU policymaking and steered the bloc’s development”.

Her opponents also “accuse her of being too close to Moscow”, Reuters reported. National Rally “received a bank loan from a Russian bank in 2014”, while Le Pen was hosted at the Kremlin by Vladimir Putin shortly before the 2017 election.

She has condemned Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and “broadly supports” targeted sanctions against Moscow, the BBC said. But she has stated on multiple occasions that she does not “want French people to suffer the consequences of sanctions” on oil and gas.

France “imports much of its natural gas through pipelines from Russia, using it for residential and commercial energy”, the broadcaster reported, prompting Le Pen to argue that any economic levies that impact energy supplies will exacerbate the country’s cost-of-living crisis.

Third time lucky?

Should Le Pen win, France will have replaced a “radical centrist” with an “a historic admirer of Putin who would flout EU rules by favouring French citizens for everything from housing to jobs”, said The Economist.

For those who are horrified by the prospect of her presidency, her polling numbers are “alarmingly high”, the paper added. And a buoyant Le Pen has told Le Parisien: “Those who did not vote for Macron are destined to join me. I can win this election.”

In her third pitch for the presidency, Le Pen can almost certainly count on the support of Eric Zemmour’s 2.4 million voters. The far-right former television pundit won 7% of the vote in the first round and has called on his supporters to back Le Pen in the run-off.

She also has the endorsement of nationalist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who won 725,305 votes in the first round. If all of Zemmour and Dupont-Aignan’s voters back her, she can bank on winning around 33% of the vote in the run-off.

Macron’s electoral arithmetic is a little more tricky. He won 27.8% of the vote in the first round and is widely expected to pick up the 5% of voters who backed Green candidate Yannick Jadot, as well as the 4.8% that voted for the conservative Valérie Pécresse.

The outcome of the election may come down to where Mélenchon voters turn, with their candidate out of the race. He has told his supporters not to back Le Pen, but has so far refused to directly endorse Macron.

Instead, he yesterday launched a consultation offering supporters the chance to choose between abstention, spoiling their ballots or backing Macron. His 7.7 million left-wing supporters may end up choosing France’s next president.

Emmanuel Macron has restarted his campaign for a second term in the Élysée Palace with a series of visits to Marine Le Pen’s strongholds.

The president, who won the first round of voting, “did minimal campaigning” ahead of Sunday’s vote, The Washington Post said, but now appears ready “for an intense two weeks, wooing voters who picked other candidates or sat out the first round”.

Le Pen’s strong showing in the first round has “unnerved the president’s supporters”, the paper added, leaving Macron with the task of knitting together what the Financial Times (FT) described as a diverse cast of “liberals and internationalists” to secure his re-election.

Scripted finish, unscripted future

As polling closed on Sunday, all signals pointed towards a rerun of 2017s Macron-Le Pen run-off. A “renewed battle for votes” is now under way, the BBC said, with the president’s team prioritising “a series of big rallies and major TV appearances”.

Le Pen, who won 23.1% of the vote in the first round, can almost certainly “count on supporters of Éric Zemmour, whose more hardline nationalism won him fourth place and 7%”, the broadcaster added.

Nationalist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan has also endorsed her, meaning the National Rally leader can “count on an impressive 33% of the entire vote”.

Macron, who won 27.8% of the vote, is widely expected to pick up the 5% of voters who backed Green candidate Yannick Jadot, as well as the 4.8% that voted for the conservative Valérie Pécresse. Both have endorsed the president after dropping out in the first round. But calculating the rest of Macron’s vote is slightly more tricky.

With the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon out of the race, his millions of voters could find themselves acting as “kingmakers” in the second round, The Guardian said. Mélenchon has urged his supporters not to vote for Le Pen, but has not directly endorsed Macron.

They “could decide the election as Macron tries to win them over in order to hold back the far-right”, the paper added, but they could stay at home with their candidate out of the race. The “youth vote”, which largely backed Mélenchon, “will be crucial” for Macron.

“Some of his supporters have told pollsters they will vote for Le Pen on the opposite end of the political spectrum”, the FT said, while “polling from both Ipsos and Elabe shows Mélenchon supporters splitting their votes three ways between abstaining, backing Macron and voting for Le Pen in a second round”.

This means that the president faces a battle to hold together a “republican front” made up of the political centre, soft-right, soft-left and hard-left in order to beat Le Pen’s ready-made coalition of “populists and nationalists”, the paper added.

Unlikely bedfellows

While the run-off between Macron and Le Pen is a direct repeat of 2017’s election, “the 2022 race has so far been anything but a replay of the contest Macron won five years ago”, France 24 reported.

“This race has been all but a procession to a predictable result”, with Macron moving to “temper the festivities” of his first round victory.

His presidency has “left mainstream conservatives in tatters and leftists exasperated”, the broadcaster added, with experts warning that “the republican front isn’t certain to sweep to the rescue this time and carry Macron to a second term”.

Mélenchon’s voters are by no means the natural bedfellows of the incumbent, who has “pledged to continue his economic reforms and maintain his policy of liberal internationalism” if he wins a second term, the FT reported.

One Mélenchon voter told The Guardian they were “worried about people not bothering to turn out to vote in the final round”, adding: “I voted Mélenchon because he was fighting for equality and there were a load of racists running for president. I’m wondering what to do myself, whether to vote Macron or just a blank ballot.”

That sentiment has been echoed by other supporters of the leftist firebrand. Vincent Martigny, a political scientist at the University of Nice, told The Washington Post: “Left-wing voters really have the key to this election in their hands. They’re the kingmakers.”

“The mood in France is nervous, it’s rebellious”, The Economist said. Macron has “his work cut out trying to win over voters on the disappointed left and centre-right”.

“As he himself warned supporters at a recent rally outside Paris, there is no room for complacency.”

1. ‘We’d all do it if we could’ is no defence of Rishi Sunak’s wife

James Bloodworth in The New Statesman

on tax avoidance

Since news broke about Rishi Sunak’s wife’s non-dom status last week, James Bloodworth has been hearing the phrase “we’d all do it if we could” – mostly coming from “Conservative apologists for the Chancellor”. This is “rather a moot point”, he writes in The New Statesman. In reality, “most people in Britain cannot afford the sort of tricksy accountant or lawyer required to avoid tax”. While tax avoidance is not illegal, it “does violate widely accepted British notions of fairness”. The scandal “highlights once again the contrasting way in which rich and poor are treated in modern Britain”. At a time when politicians are urging the country to “balance the books”, perhaps they should “get busy closing the loopholes which make it so frighteningly easy for the fabulously rich to avoid paying tax”.

Read more

2. Marine Le Pen’s rise shows conservatism has fractured

Melanie Phillips in The Times

on political identities

“How on earth” has it happened that Marine Le Pen “is now considered by millions of French voters as a centrist?” asks Melanie Phillips in The Times. The leader of the far-right National Rally party “comes from an extreme nationalist and antisemetic political family background”, but she has “gone to considerable lengths to soften her image”. Phillips suggests that Le Pen’s “current combination of nationalism and socialism makes her… a national socialist”. Vladimir Putin too “presents himself as the defender of western civilisation”, a claim that “astonishingly still strikes a chord” with “a significant number of conservatives in Britain and America as well as in France”. The current political divisions in France demonstrate “what many have refused to learn from Trump, Orban and other similar electoral uprisings” – that “the yearning among people for a shared sense of belonging is inextinguishable”.

Read more

3. Ukraine Russia war: the good, the bad and the ugly of the conflict so far

Tim Willasey-Wilsey in The Scotsman

on lessons learned

Former diplomat and professor Tim Willasey-Wilsey says that “Ukraine has been a revelation”. Writing in The Scotsman, he notes: “Its president is a modern-day hero, its army has shown remarkable courage and the refugees extraordinary dignity.” In the modern world, where “nothing seems clear-cut, it is wonderful to have a hero and an even clearer villain”. But “nothing is ever quite so simple”. Willasey-Wilsey weighs up the good (Ukraine’s military performance, Nato’s unity, Russian incompetence) with the bad (Russia’s resilience, Western indecision and energy dependency). There is also the “ugly”. Joe Biden’s comments that Putin “cannot remain in power” were “unwise but true”, says Willasey-Wilsey. “Any peace treaty with Putin still in power will just be a pause while he regroups before trying again.” There is also “nothing more dangerous than a conscript army which is frightened and waging a war it does not comprehend”. And for as long as Putin has weapons of mass destruction, he “retains the option of using them”. Doing so would “rekindle our worst Cold War nightmares about global extinction”.

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4. For those of us prone to depression, the ‘goblin mode’ trend could be dangerous

Gillian Harvey in Metro

on looking in the mirror

“In recent months, online posts have celebrated the idea of ‘goblin mode’,” says Gillian Harvey in Metro. This describes “a state in which people let themselves go feral, living in their worst clothes and giving into the urge to gorge cold pasta from the fridge with their bare hands”. Goblin mode is “an understandable reaction to the odd world we currently inhabit”. Dressing up seems futile “when a crazy warmonger is threatening to go nuclear, or Covid-19 might come calling”. Harvey says: “I get it. But I’ll never do it. For those of us prone to depression, letting the inner goblin out would be a dangerous move.” In 2014, after suffering with depression for months, Harvey says she looked in the mirror and saw a “sad little creature looking back at me”, and was “confronted by the inadmissible evidence” that, “on this level at least, I’d let the depression win”. Now, she says, “I’d never dare to go full goblin”.

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5. The US must make clear to the world it will defend Taiwan against Chinese invasion

Shinzo Abe in The Los Angeles Times

on ‘unwavering’ intentions

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded many people of the fraught relationship between China and Taiwan,” Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan, writes at the Los Angeles Times. There are “similarities” between the two situations, specifically the “very large military power gap between Taiwan and China”, that neither Ukraine nor Taiwan “has formal military allies” and “the UN’s mediation function cannot be relied upon”, says Abe. But there are “significant differences” too, and the circumstances surrounding Taiwan are “even more uneasy”. The US’s policy of “strategic ambiguity” in relation to the island nation means Taiwan has had to “consider the possibility that the US will not intervene militarily” should Beijing invade. Abe says he “always made it a rule to convey clearly” to President Xi Jinping “that he should not misjudge” Japan’s “unwavering” intentions to defend the Senkaku Islands. “There must no longer be any room for doubt in our resolve concerning Taiwan,” he says.

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We live in an age of negative partisanship, when political candidates and parties frequently mobilize voters by highlighting the awfulness of the other candidate or party rather than articulating a positive vision.

The approach is popular these days because the consensus that long galvanized many established parties and electoral coalitions has begun to break down over the past decade without the emergence of a new, unifying vision. In its absence, parties and politicians direct their attention outward, toward the threat posed by opponents, which can serve to motivate support and turnout at the polls. I don't love Party X, but at least they're not Party Y. That's negative partisanship in action, and it can be incredibly effective as an electoral strategy.

But how long can it remain so? We have reason to suspect its efficacy may soon begin to wane. That's because democratic politics is supposed to reflect popular consensus in favor of a positive vision for the future — and not Party Y isn't a positive vision for the future. Demonizing the opposition may work for one or two election cycles. But beyond that, voters are likely to lose their patience and begin demanding something to vote for rather than merely against, whatever the alternative dares to propose.

Consider the situation in France.

In the first round of voting in the presidential election this past Sunday, the incumbent centrist Emmanuel Macron finished first with 27.8 percent of the vote. Second place went to far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who won 23.2 percent. Finishing third, with 22 percent, just 1.2 points behind Le Pen, was the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Of the nine additional candidates in the race, none came close to receiving double-digit support.

Less than two weeks from now, on April 24, voters will return to the polls for the second round of voting in which Macron and Le Pen will go head-to-head. Will Macron attempt to prevail by shifting to the left to appeal to Mélenchon's voters, along with those who supported smaller left-leaning parties? Almost certainly not. Instead, he will likely follow the same strategy that worked for him five years ago, when he also faced Le Pen in the second round: He will continue to champion centrist policies while going negative, attempting to consolidate around himself the anti-Le Pen vote from across the spectrum.

This "anyone but the fascist" coalition will ideally include lots of Mélenchon voters, as well as the 4.6 percent who voted for the Green Party candidate Yannick Jadot, the 2.3 percent who supported the Communist Fabien Roussel, and the 1.8 percent who cast ballots for Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris. But Macron also hopes it will include the 4.8 percent of the electorate who voted for Valérie Pécresse of the center-right Republican Party.

That's an ideologically incoherent platform united solely by its rejection of the far right. Will that be enough for Macron to win? Probably. But will he prevail by the lopsided margin (66 to 33 percent) he achieved five years ago? Probably not. That's not just because an even more extreme candidate of the far right (Éric Zemmour) has encouraged his voters to support Le Pen and will likely be joined by the 3.1 percent who supported the socially conservative and ruralist Jean Lassalle and the 2.1 percent who favored the Gaullist and Eurosceptic candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.

Potentially more significant is a poll showing Mélenchon voters to be much less inclined to vote for Macron in the second round than they were in 2017 — and much more likely to vote for Le Pen in a protest against the establishment. If that happens, and if it's repeated across other parties, Macron could end up struggling to maintain his lead.

This isn't just an expression of the peculiarities of France's mixed presidential-parliamentary system and two-round runoff model. Indeed, something like this dynamic has been playing out in American politics since the 2020 election. Democrats underperformed in that contest at every level except the presidential race, where Joe Biden prevailed over Trump by 7 million votes. That decisive victory was largely a function of Trump's unusually high level of disapproval combined with the Biden campaign's success at making the election about kicking the incumbent out of the White House.

A vote for Biden was treated primarily as a vote against Trump.

That got Biden elected president, but it also made him quite vulnerable to a collapse in support, since lots of people who voted for him weren't expressing approval of any particular set of policies or vision of the future beyond not Trump — and that core goal was already accomplished on Day One of the Biden presidency, giving the Democrat nowhere to go but down. And that's precisely where he's gone, into the low 40s in his approval rating, with no sign at all of a rebound.

The upcoming midterm elections look dismal for Democrats. That's not very unusual for the party holding the White House. But what about in 2024? If Trump runs for president again, Biden will be set up for a replay of his negative message from 2020. Will it work a second time? So far, the polls aren't very encouraging.

But even more distressing is the prospect of Trump deciding against a run, allowing a less instantaneously toxic alternative — like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — to grab the Republican nomination. Biden could attempt a campaign organized around a not DeSantis message, but that would be incredibly risky because it could leave him sounding reactive and devoid of a positive vision for the future of the country. Vote for me and my party because we're not Republicans can work as long as the Republican message and candidate is sufficiently repulsive or scary. But when that ceases to be the case — or after four years of a presidency that lacked much of a positive message — it could very well end up sounding vacuous and adrift, tempting voters to give the other side a shot.

I certainly recognize the challenge. Biden leads a party internally divided. Any move toward the progressive left risks alienating and antagonizing moderates, and the same holds for the reverse. That can make the prospect of holding everyone together against a common threat maximally appealing. But it's a short-term solution the efficacy of which is likely to decline over time.

Kicking the can down the road is always appealing to people content with the status quo. But if the status quo isn't stable, the potential reward of bolder moves begins to take on added appeal. Does that mean Democrats should try making a new case for progressive policies? Or a fresh defense of fiscal restraint? Or some as-yet untried, unorthodox blend of conservative and liberal ideas?

That's for the party's leadership to decide. All I know is that they really need to try something if they don't want to end up doubling down on negative partisanship at the moment when it ceases to work its electoral magic.

French President Emmanuel Macron is projected to win the first round of the presidential election, but will fall far short of the 50 percent of the vote he would need to avoid a runoff, France Info reported Sunday.

According to projections compiled by consulting firms Ipsos and Sopra Steria, Macron received 28.1 percent of the vote with right-wing challenger Marine Le Pen in second place with 23.3 percent. The two will face each other in a runoff election on April 24.

Leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon finished third with 20.1 percent, while journalist Éric Zemmour, who ran to Le Pen's right, took fourth with 7.2 percent.

Almost three quarters of eligible voters cast ballots, down slightly from 2017.

Macron and Mélenchon slightly outperformed a poll conducted on Thursday and Friday, which showed their support at 26 and 17.5 percent, respectively. Le Pen underperformed slightly, having polled at 25 percent.

Early last month, Macron held a 61-31 lead over Le Pen, who he soundly defeated in 2017's runoff, but voters' concerns about rising costs of living wiped it out almost entirely in the weeks preceding the election. The two are polling dead even for the second round.

Center-right candidate Valérie Pécresse, who received just 5 percent of the vote, conceded defeat Sunday and said she would vote for Macron "to prevent the coming to power of Marine Le Pen."

According to an Ipsos poll conducted on Friday, 38 percent of Pécresse's supporters identified Macron as their second choice, while only 19 percent named Le Pen.

Ring-wing challenger Marine Le Pen is snapping at the heels of centrist French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of Sunday's presidential election, according to a poll published Friday by French research firm Elaba.

The poll, which surveyed 1,801 people on Thursday and Friday, shows Macron and Le Pen polling at 26 and 25 percent, respectively, in the crowded first-round field. The gap is will within the margin of error.

Both Macron and Le Pen are all but certain to make the second round. The third-highest polling candidate, leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is polling at 17.5 percent.

In French presidential elections, if no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote in the first round, voters return to the polls two weeks later for a runoff between the top two candidates. In 2017, Macron trounced Le Pen in the second round, receiving nearly two-thirds of the vote.

Polling suggests that a repeat of 2017 is unlikely. According to Elabe, the 61-31 lead Macron held over Le Pen in second-round polling conducted in early March has entirely evaporated. The incumbent president now polls at 51 percent to Le Pen's 49, well within the margin of error once again.

According to The Associated Press, Le Pen, once viewed as a far-right extremist, has successfully broadened her appeal while sidestepping accusations of too-cozy relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, per AP, rising prices have eaten into Macron's poll numbers.

Marine Le Pen is closing in on Emmanuel Macron as the race to become France’s next president tightens ahead of Sunday’s first-round vote.

A month ago, the leader of the far-right National Rally party was trailing Macron by ten points. But weeks of strong polling suggest she is now the “clear favourite” to challenge the president for the keys to the Élysée Palace in a second-round run-off, the BBC said.

“I never stopped being confident,” she told Le Figaro earlier this week as campaigning entered its final days. “I am ready, personally and politically.”

Years in opposition

When she became president of what was then called the National Front in 2011, Le Pen prioritised “changing the racist and anti-Semitic image” that had been allowed to form under the leadership of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, said CNN. But this has “taken time” and determination”, triggering a “bitter family feud”.

Tensions came to a head in 2013 when her father repeated his claim that the Nazi gas chambers had been “but a detail of history”, CNN reported. Le Pen publicly distanced herself from her father and, in 2015, expelled him from the party he founded in 1972.

In her campaign against Macron, she has also taken other steps to soften her image, posing for pictures “hugging horses and pet kittens”, The Guardian reported. She has also sought to “play up” her “single-mother status” and “play down” her “once unabashed enthusiasm for Putin”, the Financial Times said.

But voters should be “under no illusions” regarding Le Pen. Her plans, the paper said, includes “repudiating the primacy of EU law, establishing a ‘national preference’ for hiring French workers over foreigners and banning Muslim headscarves in all public places”.

Her ambitions are clear, The Guardian said. Unlike her disgraced father, who was “content to be a protest vote”, Le Pen wants “power and political office”,

Chances of winning

According to Politico’s Poll of Polls, Le Pen looks set to win 22% of the vote in the first round, having narrowed the gap between her and Macron who is on 27%. Polling for the expected 24 April run-off vote also shows Le Pen has slashed the incumbent’s lead.

It is “noticeable that the media are less hostile to her this election”, said Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator. The former political outsider “has worked hard to cultivate a presidential air” since Macron’s 2017 victory and now looks like she could “actually win”.

Political background

Le Pen learned of her father’s notoriety when she was eight years old and was woken by a bomb attack on her family’s apartment in Paris. As a child, she felt her “family surname was a burden”, The Guardian said, but she “constantly stood up for her father”.

When French newspaper Libération revealed in 1985 that her father had engaged in torture during the Algerian War of Independence he advised that she take the day off school. But the young Le Pen “refused and went in defending him”, the paper added.

She studied law and was a member of the Bar of Paris until 1998, when she joined the legal department of the National Front. She was quickly promoted through the ranks, serving as vice-president, a member of the European Parliament and then a member of parliament in France.

This is her third campaign for the presidency. She finished third behind François Hollande and incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, before coming second when Macron won the presidency five years later.

What about outside of politics?

Le Pen married Franck Chauffroy, a business executive who worked for the National Front, in 1995. They had three children before their divorce in 2000.

In 2002, she married Eric Lorio, the former national secretary of the National Front. They divorced in 2006. Between 2009 and 2019, she was in a relationship with Louis Aliot, who was the National Front general secretary from 2005 to 2010.

In a recent column about the landslide victory for Viktor Orban's Fidesz Party in Hungary's election last Sunday, I warned Western liberals and progressives against attributing the outcome entirely to electoral mischief and media manipulation by the incumbent. The truth is that the populist-nationalist message of Orban and his party appeals to lots of voters outside the capital of Budapest. That's consistent with electoral results across the democratic world, where in recent election cycles people in rural areas and small towns have begun banding together in opposition to urban progressivism and in favor of a harder-edged, right-wing mode of politics.

In the first round of France's presidential election this Sunday, the pattern may well be repeated in a context where it would be impossible to attribute the results to an incumbent giving himself an unfair advantage in the contest.

French President Emmanuel Macron of the centrist Forward party leads the polls, but he's been sinking for the past three weeks, while Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party has been rising. Aggregate polls currently place Le Pen 4 to 5 points behind Macron with the gap closing, while some more recent polls show her just 2 points behind. This reproduces the dynamic that prevailed in the run-up to the dual political earthquakes of 2016: the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump's victory against Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential election.

Could France and the wider democratic world be close to another upset victory for the antiliberal right?

A narrow win for Le Pen on Sunday would be significant mainly for its symbolism. Assuming no candidate prevails with a majority of the vote (and no one is remotely close to accomplishing that), the second, decisive election will be held two weeks later, on April 24, between the first- and second-place finishers from April 10. That's when things could really become ominous.

In some ways, this would be a rerun of the presidential election five years ago, when Macron beat Le Pen in the first-round vote by 2.7 points, setting up a second-round showdown. In the intervening weeks, two important things happened. First, Macron mobilized an anyone-but-the-fascist coalition in support of himself and his newly formed centrist party. This anticipated the similar cross-ideological coalition that unseated Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel last year as well as the one that tried and failed to do the same against Orban in Hungary last Sunday.

Second, Le Pen did poorly in her single debate against Macron, coming off as arrogant and ill-informed throughout their exchange. The conviction that she was unready to assume the office of the presidency contributed to a last-minute collapse in the polls that delivered a landslide victory for Macron, who prevailed with two-thirds of the vote (66 to 33 percent).

If Macron faces Le Pen in the second-round vote this time, he will no doubt attempt to reassemble his anti-fascist coalition from 2017. But we have reason to worry about its likely effectiveness. For one thing, Le Pen changed the name of her party (from National Front to National Rally) in the wake of her defeat five years ago and has been remarkably successful at reforming its image by distancing herself from the toxic legacy of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who led the NF from 1972 to 2011. Some of this change can no doubt be attributed to Le Pen's political skill, but the presence of far-right firebrand Éric Zemmour in the race may have helped as well, making Le Pen appear tame and responsible by comparison.

But a broader anti-establishment shift of the French electorate may also be playing a role. The other candidate surging in the polls just days from the first-round vote is the leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, currently polling at 16 percent, behind Macron at 26 percent and Le Pen at 22 percent. Center-right candidate Valérie Pércresse, meanwhile, sits at just 8 percent after a polling collapse that's been unfolding over the past several months.

If Macron and Le Pen face off in the second round, where will Mélenchon's first-round voters go? Will they rally to Macron's side as many of them did five years ago in order to prevent the National Front from prevailing? Or will at least some of them trade a left-wing anti-establishment candidate for a right-wing one with a new name? Or will they simply stay home, depriving Macron of voters he will desperately need on April 24? With current head-to-head polling showing the second-round vote between Macron and Le Pen a dead heat, the incumbent is going to need all the votes he can get.

But where will they come from? To prevail, Macron will be counting on support from Green Party and Socialist Party voters, currently polling at 5 and 2 percent respectively, along with as many of Mélenchon's first-round voters as he can muster, plus some right-leaning votes. How can he lure the latter away from Le Pen? He can try to portray her as an extremist. And he can attempt to fluster her in their televised debate, hoping to re-enact events from 2017.

But beyond that, it's far from clear what he can do. Five years ago, Macron was an untested proposition — a young, charismatic, and articulate neoliberal leading a new party. That made him a suitable screen onto which a restive nation could project its future hopes. But now he represents the status quo in a country increasingly dominated by polarizing political and cultural discontents and perhaps eager for a different kind of future.

That makes the upcoming election in France the latest high-stakes contest over the shape of politics in the liberal-democratic world. Viktor Orban's decisive victory in Hungary last weekend felt like a dispiriting punch to the gut for many liberals and progressives across the West. But that's nothing compared to how they will feel if French voters deliver the presidency to Marine Le Pen later this month.

1. The man at the centre of the French election isn’t even on the ballot

Harrison Stetler at The New York Times

on powerful media

“Like the rest of Europe, France is gripped by the war in Ukraine,” writes Harrison Stetler at The New York Times. Emmanuel Macron “hopes to prevail” in the first round of the presidential election, after a “muted campaign in which he posed as a steady hand in a time of global instability”. But “a noxious blend of oligarchy, nostalgia and bellicose nationalism is ever more ubiquitous on this side of the new Iron Curtain”, and in France “it is led by a buoyant and confident right”. Beside Marine Le Pen, Valérie Pécresse and Éric Zemmour is “the media mogul Vincent Bolloré”, who “wields a fearsome agenda-setting power”. His media outlets are “known for adopting the flair, tics and style of Fox News” and they play “an outsize role in directing national debate”. The three right-wing candidates “recycle, in varying shades, messages that run on a loop on his networks”. Bolloré’s name “is a byword for the political power of French oligarchs” and while he “portrays himself as above the partisan fray”, he has “reshaped French political life”. Stetler concludes: “In 2022, France’s political culture is becoming a circle, with Mr. Bolloré drawing the circumference.”

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2. I’m an expert in false confessions who looked at Melissa Lucio’s case. Texas is executing an innocent woman

Gisli H. Gudjonsson in The Independent

on a question of injustice

Gisli H. Gudjonsson is a leading expert in false confessions. He says: “Melissa Lucio’s case is one of the most tragic I have come across in my 40-year career as a clinical forensic psychologist. It is an extraordinarily potent example of how a vulnerable person can be psychologically manipulated.” Lucio’s daughter Mariah died from a head trauma in 2007. Forensic evidence now suggests her death was the result of falling down a flight of stairs some days before she died, but “investigators refused to accept that the fall had happened, or that the head trauma was caused by anything other than physical abuse”. So, officers “focused their attention and suspicions on Lucio”. Expert evaluation and analysis found “profound problems” with Lucio’s “so-called confession”, that was made “after hours of relentless interrogation” that began soon after her daughter’s death. Her admissions were “tentative and inadvertent. When implicating herself, she repeated the words and narrative that officers had suggested to her for hours”. Gudjonsson says there was “a very high risk of false confession” and urges “a careful reconsideration of her case to prevent an irreversible miscarriage of justice”.

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3. Beware, Remainers are regrouping

David Frost in The Telegraph

on domestic divides

“The Brexit battle seems long over,” says David Frost in The Telegraph. “With a supreme effort, Britain shook itself free of the European Union and became a full democracy once again, an outcome which had seemed impossible almost until the moment it happened.” And yet, says the former chief negotiator for the UK’s exit from the EU, “on the fringes of politics the unreconciled Remainers are regrouping”. See the “#brexitshambles” Twitter hashtag. Keir Starmer knows that cosying up with Remainers “will make him about as welcome in the Red Wall as Vladimir Putin in downtown Kyiv”, but “he can’t ignore his supporters”. Frost says there’s “little chance of a serious ‘rejoin’ campaign developing in the short term”, and “leaders of the pro-EU cause recognise that themselves”. They aim “to keep us aligned with the EU, using the Northern Ireland Protocol as a weapon”. He admits “that leaving the single market and customs union” has had “some effect on trade in the short run”, and so the UK must “get on with our own domestic reforms to improve growth”. If the question of Leave or Remain must be addressed again, “let’s revisit the question in 2067. Meanwhile, let’s get on with the job.”

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4. Ramadan feasts face extinction as people can’t afford to eat if we let Tories win

Anila Baig in The Daily Mirror

on being ‘squeezed to death’

In this holy month of Ramadan, we are “free from the restrictions of Covid” and once again “mosques are full of worshippers, and we can visit friends and family”, says Anila Baig in the Daily Mirror. But now there is “another menacing shadow – the cost-of-living crisis”. Ramadan “is not just about fasting but also feasting”. After breaking the fast, Muslims “tuck into lavish, lovingly cooked meals”. But this year “many Muslims are feeling hungry, not because they are fasting, but because they can’t afford to eat”, says Baig. Charity Islamic Relief notes that 50% of Muslim households are living in poverty, something “we’ve always thought of… as being something that happened in far-flung countries, but it is happening right here at unprecedented levels”. Many in the UK “aren’t just ‘feeling the pinch’, we are being squeezed to death”. Baig asks: “have we ever had it so bad?” People “should be taking to the streets but we are too hungry and too ill because Covid hasn’t gone anywhere”. When will the government be held “to account” for its “corrupt decisions”? It may be Ramadan, but this writer says “clearly not ALL the devils have been locked up”.

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5. Modern life is rubbish for creative thinking

James Marriott in The Times

on interruptions

James Marriott does his “best thinking” between 8pm and midnight. “Lamplight, the stillness of evening, the gathering dark outside the window,” he says in The Times – “here is the mood of calm and heightened awareness necessary to lure ideas out of the shadows”. Writing a weekly column, he says, “induces a neurotic vigilance towards ideas. In my previous jobs, thinking was a bonus.” Now, he spends life “twitchily poised to leap at passing thoughts”. And if you spend enough time “hunting” for ideas, “you realise that modern life is organised to prevent you from thinking”. History’s great thinkers demanded three things: “silence, solitude and some form of physical exercise”. Modern offices supply “noise, ceaseless company, and desk-bound inertia”. Marriott says we are “expected to use our minds more creatively than our ancestors” but society is “hostile to thought”. Yet “we continue to love the quantifiable (emails, presentation, data)”. Experts say an “‘oscillating’ work pattern” produces “the best thoughts” – a “good thing” in a post-Covid hybrid working era. “The bad news is that nobody has yet abolished email.”

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Emmanuel Macron won the first round of the French presidential election and will once again face Marine Le Pen in a deciding poll that promises to be an extremely close contest.

The incumbent led the pack in the first round of voting, taking 27.8% of the vote compared with Le Pen’s 23.1% and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s 22%. The results mean a rerun of the 2017 fight for the presidency that put Macron in the Elysée Palace.

It was a “convincing” first-round victory for Macron, said the BBC, but polls suggest that the run-off, which will take place on Sunday, “could be much closer”.

Here is everything you need to know about the election campaign, the two candidates and their chances of winning.

1. The latest

As France prepared to go to the polls this Sunday, “finding a French election poster for either top candidate” that hadn't been defaced was “almost like a treasure hunt”, said BBC Europe editor Katyla Adler.

The “violent dislike” that many voters express for either Macron or Le Pen, or for both, “can take your breath away”, Adler wrote. But the far-right challenger for the French presidency is at least “used to it”, as the daughter of “infamous anti-immigration, nationalist politician” Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Following her two previous failed bids for the presidency, the National Rally leader has presented “the softest public version of herself yet” this time round, adopting a “notably warmer speaking tone”, Adler continued. But while Le Pen’s “focus on the working French struggling to make ends meet” has also boosted her popularity ratings, “large swathes of France simply don’t buy it”.

And Le Pen “is not the only one with a reputation problem”, with Macron struggling to shake off his reputation as a “president of the rich”.

The “biggest challenge” for both Le Pen and Macron, said The Guardian, was to “catch reluctant floating voters”, particularly the 7.7m who backed left-wing candidate Mélenchon in the first round of the election.

Almost a quarter of the eligible population failed to turn out for the first vote, “and many of those politically orphaned by the result are unlikely to have their arms twisted into voting for either of two candidates they dislike”, the paper predicted.

Voter apathy aside, a victory for Macron would be quite a “feat” by the incumbent, who “remains the strong favourite to win”, according to The Economist.

“Under the Fifth Republic, the French have never re-elected an incumbent president holding a majority in parliament,” said the paper. But if he secured a second term, as the head of a “fractured, discontented country”, Macron would be faced with “managing the dismay as much as the expectations”.

2. The candidates

Macron is widely considered the favourite to win re-election on 24 April. The president has pointed to “new foreign investment projects in France and a booming economy as proof his economic reforms have been bearing fruit”, Reuters said.

Macron, who leads La République En Marche (Republic Forward), has also set himself up for a conflict with those who refuse to be vaccinated, “ramping up his rhetoric against France’s minority of non-vaccinated people – less than 10% of the population – in part as a way of setting the political battle lines for the election”, The Guardian reported.

Running for a third time, Le Pen is once again the candidate for her far-right Rassemblement national (National Rally) party. The daughter of the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is opposed to globalisation, which she has previously blamed for negative economic trends, as well as standing against any expansion in the EU’s power.

She has previously called for a referendum on leaving the bloc, but since 2019 has said she no longer advocates France leaving the EU or the euro currency. Her party also calls for the “de-Islamisation” of French society, while Le Pen has argued in favour of the establishment of a privileged partnership with Russia.

Unlike previous campaigns, she has “bet on dropping the populist messaging that once characterised her”, The New York Times (NYT) said, pushing efforts to “un-demonize” her party and its association “with flashes of antisemitism and xenophobia”.

3. Out of the race

Le Pen’s decision to detoxify her image is in part a result of the rise of far-right candidate Zemmour. Dubbed “the French Donald Trump” by Politico, the controversial former television pundit racked up “far more prime-time TV slots and front-page stories than many of his rivals” during his campaign.

Zemmour “admires the former US president”, according to The Guardian’s Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis, and has been “convicted for inciting racial hatred”. But those criminal convictions have not stopped his “meteoric” rise to fame as first a journalist and now the “new face” of the French far-right.

After he failed to reach the run-off stage, Zemmour called for his supporters to back Le Pen in the second round of voting.

Valerie Pécresse, the candidate for the centre-right Républicains, declared her candidacy in July 2021 following the party’s internal primary. Nicknamed “the bulldozer”, she stated that she would become France’s first female president, describing herself as “one-third Thatcher and two-thirds Merkel”, France 24 said.

From the left of the French political spectrum, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the socialist Groupe La France insoumise, is also running for the top job. Like Le Pen, he was also on his third crack at winning the presidency.

A socialist, he stands for increased labour rights and the expansion of French welfare programmes. He also argues in favour of mass redistribution of wealth to rectify socioeconomic inequality and is an outspoken critic of the EU, which he claims has been corrupted and is now a tool for neoliberal ideology.

He has told his backers not to vote for Le Pen in the final round, but has not endorsed Macron’s bid for a second term.

Christiane Taubira, the leftist unity candidate elected during the unofficial “people’s primary”, previously served as justice minister under president Francois Hollande. She also sat in the National Assembly of France for French Guiana from 1993 to 2012 and was a member of the European Parliament from 1994 to 1999.

4. How the election works

The French public went to the polls on 10 April to place their votes in the first round of the election.

As no candidate won 50% of the first-round vote the election will continue into a second-round run-off on 24 April. In the second round, the top two candidates from the first round – in this case, Macron and Le Pen – will compete and the candidate with a majority wins.

5. The polls

According to Politico’s Poll of Polls, Macron is set to win 55% of the vote in the run-off. Le Pen is currently trailing on 45%.

The meteoric rise of a controversial television pundit has put him in prime position to replace Marine Le Pen as the biggest threat to Emmanuel Macron in next year’s French presidential election.

Dubbed the “French Trump” by Politico, Eric Zemmour is racking up “far more prime-time TV slots and front-page stories than many of his rivals”. And while critics claim his “inflammatory rhetoric on immigration and Islam” is “degrading the public debate ahead of April’s election”, Zemmour is “on the rise in the polls”, said the news site.

Provocateur politique

Zemmour is an “admirer of the former US president”, according to The Guardian’s Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis, and has been “convicted for inciting racial hatred”. But those criminal convictions have not stopped his “meteoric” rise to fame as first a journalist and now the “new face” of the French far-right.

Born in the Paris suburbs in 1958 to a Berber Jewish family who moved to France during the Algerian War, Zemmour graduated from the elite Paris Institute of Political Studies, a university that boasts Macron and four former French presidents among its alumni.

Zemmour twice failed to win admission to the École Nationale d’Administration, a training school for senior French officials, before joining Le Quotidien de Paris as a journalist on the newspaper’s politics desk. He later worked at Le Figaro as a political reporter and then moved into TV, hosting his own show, Face à l'Info, from 2019 to 2021.

The veteran journalist has also published a series of non-fiction books about race in France. His 2014 book The French Suicide sold more than 500,000 copies and won the illustrious Prix Combourg-Chateaubriand.

Zemmour “portrayed himself as a truth-teller in a news media dominated by politically correct, left-leaning journalists”, The New York Times (NYT) said. He has talked about the “existential threat of a ‘great replacement’” – a “loaded term” related to racial dominance that Le Pen has “avoided”.

Zemmour has “railed against the immigration of Muslim Africans” in particular, the paper added, and has repeatedly claimed that such new arrivals threaten to “overwhelm France’s more established white and Christian population”.

His controversial pronouncements have triggered a series of lawsuits, with Zemmour fined two times in 2011 for provocation of racial discrimination, and for provocation of hate against Muslims in 2018. He was acquitted on six other occasions.

The highly divisive public figure does not have any party political affiliation and has yet to confirm officially that he will run in the upcoming French election next year.

But polling by Harris Interactive last week of more than 1,000 French voters found that he would currently come second in the contest, with only Macron ahead. Zemmour would net 17% percent of the vote, the survey found, with Macron on 24% and Le Pen on 15%.

The poll “is an outlier” when compared with an “aggregate of all available polls, which shows Zemmour at 13%, behind Le Pen at 17% and Macron on 24%” , said Politico. But the Harris Interactive results “made headlines nevertheless”.

Clash of civilisations

Zemmour’s political ambitious are “aimed at the far-right Le Pen dynasty”, said The Guardian’s Chrisafis. “While the anti-immigration Le Pen tried to broaden her voter base by sanitising her Front National’s image”, the former TV pundit has won support by arguing that “she has gone too soft”.

Zemmour has claimed that “France wants a more radical take” on what he has branded a “war of civilisations”, Chrisafis added. But, according to Cecile Alduy, a Stanford University professor and expert on French politics, Zemmour is actually deploying a “very-old fashioned, French far-right discourse”.

Alduy told The Guardian that there is “nothing new in what he’s saying”, adding: “What is new is the reception and acceptance of this discourse in the public conversation. It’s a turning point in French political history that Zemmour’s discourse is given so much space and legitimacy by the media.”

Last month he stirred up further controversy “by calling for a ban on foreign-sounding names such as Muhammad, Kevin and Jordan”, reported The Times. Zemmour pledged that if he ever held the presidency, “he would reinstate a law introduced by Napoleon Bonaparte stipulating that only names included in the Christian calendar of Saints and those from ‘ancient history’ were authorised”.

As well as attacking foreign names, Zemmour has also made headlines by “calling for curbs on immigration and measures to force immigrant families – and, notably, Muslims – to adopt traditional French customs and culture”, the paper added.

As a budding politician, he “seeks to radicalise, provoke and frame the debate around his own obsessions”, said The Economist. Zemmour is positioning himself as a “counter-feminist” and “anti-woke” candidate who “blends erudition with outrage, simple sentences and rant”.

Despite his Jewish heritage, he has also drawn fierce criticism for stating that “Vichy France in fact protected French Jews”, The Economist added – a claim that has been “attacked by historians”, said The Guardian’s Chrisafis.

Despite allegations that he is “stoking division in France and degrading the public debate ahead of April’s election”, his supporters insist that he is “a breath of fresh air in a society beset by political correctness”, said Politico.

And like Trump, he is winning support because he has “checkmated the media”, according to Gaspard Gantzer, a former advisor to ex-president Francois Hollande.

“Zemmour is very well-known in a splintered media landscape,” Gantzer told the site, and he is “ahead of the pack because those who make the most outrageous statements have the advantage today”.

Emmanuel Macron is facing a fresh threat to his hopes of winning a second term in the Elysee Palace, following a surge in support for France’s traditional conservative parties in regional elections yesterday.

The result also delivered a blow to far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who is widely viewed as Macron’s biggest rival for the top job.

Both Macron’s centrist La Republique En Marche (LREM) party Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) failed to win any regions in the local votes, boosting “the aspirations of centre-right leaders determined to prevent next year’s presidential election becoming a two-horse race”, The Times reports.

Humbled front-runners

Le Pen had hoped to take Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in a first regional victory for RN, but that ambition was thwarted by an alliance of rival parties in a so-called “republican front” to keep the far-right from office. Instead, the region was won by the Republicans, after left-wing candidates withdrew from the race.

The last regional elections were held in 2015, a year before Macron founded LREM. But despite his high hopes when voters went to the polls yesterday, LREM also “obtained none of France’s 13 metropolitan councils, in a further sign of its failure to put down local roots”, says The Times.

By contrast, the Republicans and the Socialist Party “both received surprise boosts in polls that favoured the incumbents but drew a meagre turnout of under 35%”, the BBC reports.

According to exit polls, Macron’s party polled at just 7% nationwide - a result that experts believe “could shift the balance between political heavyweights vying for a position in the 2022 presidential race”, Deutsche Welle (DW) reports.

Le Pen’s party also got a relatively disappointing 20% of the vote, while the candidates of mainstream conservative parties retained their seats in all regions.

The “mainstream Right” won 38.1% of ballots nationally, “giving its candidates a boost before the presidential vote in April 2022”, says The Telegraph. Left-leaning and green parties also surpassed expectations, with 34.8% of the vote.

Le Pen yesterday accused rival parties of forming “unnatural alliances” to block RN from power, telling her supporters that they “did all they could to keep us out and prevent us from showing the French our capacity to lead a regional administration”.

Meanwhile, Stanislas Guerini, an MP in Macron’s governing LREM, said that while he “rejoiced” in Le Pen’s inability to win a foothold, the LREM also had “work to do” ahead of the presidential election.

Marching on

The Hauts-de-France region, near Calais in the north, was also earmarked as a potential gain for Le Pen’s RN, but was won instead by incumbent conservative Xavier Bertrand. After polls closed, he told supporters: “The far-right has been stopped in its tracks and we have pushed it back sharply.”

Bertrand is now emerging “as the conservatives’ favourite in opinion polls to become the party's face in the presidential election”, DW reports.

As well as quashing Le Pen’s hopes of victory in Hauts-de-France, “Macron’s aides see Bertrand as a threat to the president’s centre-right voter base”, according to the broadcaster.

The results have also raised “questions over the accuracy of polls predicting that next year’s presidential election will be a repeat of 2017”, says The Time. Indeed, the outcome signals “a renaissance for regional politicians once dismissed by Macron as belonging to an ‘old world’ on the verge of extinction”.

The paper’s Paris correspondent Charles Bremner attributes the “thrashing” taken by the president’s party in Sunday’s vote to “the failure of La Republique en Marche to establish itself beyond its existence as a Macron vehicle”.

But “it is premature to see the emergence of Bertrand, a down-to-earth one-time insurance executive, as Macron’s main threat”, adds Bremner, who notes that the Republicans are still “squabbling over who should run” while the LREM boss has plenty of time to “recalibrate and broaden his appeal”.

For Le Pen, the key problem is that while she has “succeeded in pushing political debates to the right”, she has repeatedly “failed to deliver results at the polls”, says The Telegraph.

Picking up one region would have been a “been a first and a boost for her presidential bid”, says BBC Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield. But her “voters stayed away from the polls” in a “big disappointment for the hard-right”.

On the other hand, the low turnout across the board may further complicate the picture ahead of the presidential vote. Despite “appeals by politicians and the prime minister, Jean Castex, for voters to turn out”, almost two-thirds “shunned the polling stations”, The Guardian reports.

Political analysts argue that the likely reason for “the lack of interest in the regional elections” is that the French electorate has “become focused on the presidential election”, says the paper. And that suggests yesterday’s results may not be replicated come next April.

An internal war has broken out among France’s leading conservative politicians over the decision to form a local alliance with Emmanuel Macron’s party ahead of council elections.

The pact between the leader of Les Republicains (LR) in Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur (Paca), ruled from regional capital Marseille, and President Macron’s En Marche (Onward) is “aimed at blocking a takeover of the regional government” by Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, The Times reports.

But Republicans have “clashed bitterly” over the deal, which has pushed their party to “the brink of meltdown”, the paper continues. While the pact is widely viewed as reflecting “the weakness of the president’s party”, conservative leaders fear that Macron is staging a “takeover” of the LR - the party of political heavyweights including Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.

The row erupted on Sunday, when Macron’s centrist party withdrew its slate of candidates from the ballot in the wealthy and right-leaning region - handing a major boost to the LR. Prior to the En Marche retreat, National Rally candidate Thierry Mariani was polling in first place with 31% of the vote, trailed by the LR on 27% and Macron’s party on 13%.

However, critics within the “already enfeebled” LR argue that the move only serves to underline “the current dominance of national politics” by Macron and Le Pen, the Financial Times (FT) reports.

The Republicans’ elected Paca president, Renaud Muselier, was stripped of the party ticket following the announcement of the pact, which was described as a “stab in the back” by LR parliamentarian Eric Ciotti.

After removing Muselier from the party’s list of candidates, Republican leader Christian Jacob said in a statement that “fear of losing on one side and cynicism on the other have never produced a political programme”.

The Republican party has “long pedigree and is strong at the local and regional levels of French politics”, but “has struggled since Macron’s victory in the presidential and legislative elections”, says the FT.

In the European elections in 2019, the LR won less than 8.5% of the vote, trailing behind the French Green Party. The disappointing result for the Republicans came two years after Macron poached his prime minister and many other cabinet members from their party.

The conservative defectors include Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who claims that the newly unveiled alliance marks “the final divorce decree between the two irreconcilable parts” of his former party.

The two wings split when Macron faced off against Le Pen in the final run-off of the 2017 presidential election, with one side backing the En Marche boss while the other expressed no preference.

The latest drama within the LR comes ahead of national elections next spring during which “another run-off between Macron and Le Pen” is the most likely result, The Times says. According to Politico’s poll of polls, Le Pen (26%) is currently leading Macron (25%) by one point, and 59% of voters disapprove of the incumbent’s presidency compared with 39% who approve.

French opposition politicians have called for border controls between France and Italy as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.

Nationalist Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally), criticised the French government’s decision to allow Juventus supporters from Italy to attend a football match in Lyon on Wednesday.

“The reality is that a border protects populations, whatever the situation,” said Le Pen.

Right-wing Les Republicains MP Eric Ciotti, whose Alpes-Maritimes constituency borders northern Italy, warned of “incoherence” in the government’s strategy.

He asked why schoolchildren returning from Italy were being quarantined, but “at least 3,000 people” from a “very high risk area” were allowed to attend the football match, reports Radio France Internationale.

Former socialist minister Segolene Royal also said the decision seemed “incoherent”.

Local politicians had called for Juventus fans to be banned from the game, but they were overruled by the national government.

Junior education minister Gabriel Attal was sent out to defend the government’s actions, telling French TV station BFMTV that health experts had advised that it was not necessary to stop the supporters entering France.

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What have European populists said?

As well as calling for a ban on Italian football supporters, Le Pen has claimed that France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is lying about the scale of the virus’s spread in the country, reports The Times. So far, 17 cases of coronavirus have been reported in France and two people have died.

“Not telling the truth is in fact aggravating the feeling of danger amongst the population,” she said.

In Italy, far-right politician Matteo Salvini, former interior minister and current leader of the populist Lega Nord party, has blamed the coronavirus outbreak in Italy (which has 400 cases and 12 deaths so far) on migration, and has called for “armour-plated” borders.

But his party’s message differs from Le Pen’s. While Lega Nord wants restrictions on travel from China and other non-European countries, it does not support Le Pen’s wariness of Italians.

Attilio Fontana, chairman of Lega Nord in Lombardy, one of Italy’s worst affected regions, said France’s decision to isolate children returning home from northern Italy was “senseless and offensive”.

He blamed the arrival of the virus in Italy on passengers from China, who he says avoided controls by making stopovers in “Frankfurt, Paris and Berlin”.

In Germany, Alice Weidel, leader in the Bundestag of the far-right AfD party, said the spread of the virus in the country – which has seen 19 cases – was down to the “dogma of the open border”.

And, in Spain, Santiago Abascal, head of the populist Vox movement, said the Socialist government was “so keen to bring down borders it has not even taken the minimum measures dictated by common sense”.

Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Lorenzo Quadri, of the right-wing Lega dei Ticinesi party, called for a “closed-doors” policy, says The Independent.

“It is alarming that the dogma of wide-open borders is considered a priority,” he said.

Will anyone listen?

Populists will seek to exploit the outbreak of coronavirus to further their campaign for tough anti-immigration measures and the reinstatement of borders within the EU, says the Times.

Most populist politicians are vocal about their desire to control borders in normal times, but the spread of coronavirus has only bolstered their cause.

The Schengen Agreement between 26 European countries (including 22 EU member states) currently allows people to flow freely between countries with no checks.

But populists say that should change, and borders should close.

“So far no country has taken that drastic step, but privately European officials warned that this could change quickly,” says The New York Times.

On Wednesday, the EU’s head of communicable diseases said that Europe should do more to prepare for a spread of the virus similar to the outbreak seen in northern Italy.

“Our current assessment is that we will likely see a similar situation in other countries in Europe, and that the picture may vary from country to country,” said Andrea Ammon, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

“We also need to consider the need to prepare for other scenarios – for example, large clusters elsewhere in Europe,” she added.

Would closing borders work?

Ammon stopped short of suggesting European countries close their borders, which would end the cornerstone EU principle of free movement of people and goods.

But a number of countries suspended Schengen in 2015 to take control of their borders amid the refugee crisis. Rules allow for the temporary reintroduction of border checks for a small number of reasons, including terrorist attacks, major migrant surges or health emergencies.

Marie De Somer, head of the migration programme at the Brussels-based think-tank European Policy Centre, said border checks could show Schengen’s flexibility.

“If health experts and the commission recommend this, then it would show the system actually can function even in a crisis,” she said. “The checks would need to be lifted according to the rules, when the threat from the virus goes away.”

But with coronavirus, most health experts agree that shutting borders wouldn’t contain the outbreak.

“Travel restrictions don’t work: people find another way around it, it might only slow the virus down,” said Dr Clare Wenham, of the London School of Economics Global Health Initiative.

The World Health Organization has advised against restricting travel and trade, while EU health ministers said last week that any travel measures introduced to contain the the virus should safeguard free movement within the EU, reports Politico.

Emmanuel Macron swept to power in May 2017 by presenting himself as a youthful anti-populist reformer, a shining example of what was still possible in centrist politics.

Eighteen months later and rocked by mass protests and record low approval ratings, France’s youngest leader since Napoleon faces electoral oblivion.

Last year’s demonstrations against his labour law and rail reform had already tested his presidency, but combined with a bodyguard scandal, stubbornly high unemployment, multiple ministerial resignations and a series of media missteps it appears the French working and middle classes have had enough.

Seemingly innocuous protests over fuel tax rises – the so-called gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protest movement – has given way to deadly clashes on the streets of Paris over Macron’s perceived elitist reforms.

“It might have started as a protest against the rise of the fuel tax, but the yellow vests’ anger stems from years of rising precarity,” says Helen Lewis in the New Statesman. “They demand more than just the scrapping of the tax: they want all taxes lowered and a “citizens’ debate” on spending power and climate change. In the protests, “Macron resign” is a recurring battle cry”.

The president’s aloofness and determination to stand his ground has contributed to his plummeting approval ratings, which currently stand at just 26%. By contrast public support for the ‘yellow vest’ protests is holding steady at 77%.

On Tuesday he stuck to his line, saying: “What I've taken from these last few days is that we shouldn't change course because it is the right one and necessary.”

But his remarks were immediately seized upon as a sign of how out of touch with ordinary citizens he is.

“This was a technocrat's speech, disconnected from the reality of the French” said Damien Abad, a Conservative MP.

“Macron was supposed to be a new, hopeful face” writes Lewis. “Instead, the frustration and violence of the protests suggest, many French people feel he has brought more of the status quo”.

According to political scientist Pascal Perrineau, he has lost three parts of his voter base: the left and the centre-left through his fiscal measures in favour of the rich; pensioners who have suffered cuts; and the middle classes and young voters who swept him to power.

In Europe too, his bid to position himself the logical heir apparent to Angela Merkel as the continent’s dominant political figure “faces big hurdles”, says US News. His headline policies of an EU army and eurozone reform have received lukewarm support. Moreover, “critics say Macron's policy proposals don't truly address the issues that are fueling nationalist parties in Europe” reports the news site.

Even if Macron eventually emerges as Europe's leader, it may not help him at home “where he is deeply unpopular for personal, political and policy reasons,” says Philippe Marliere, a professor of French and European politics at University College London. Being seen as the EU's top head of state “doesn't really pay off domestically”.

“Because of his political inexperience, his intellectual arrogance, his hubris, and by taking himself for a solitary Jupiterian hero, Macron has locked himself into the image of the president of the rich. Now, France – which prefers equality to freedom – is slapping him in the face”, writes Marion Van Renterghem in The Guardian.

In the wake of last week’s protests, far-right leader Marine Le Pen claimed Macron was “devoid of any solutions” and that France was undergoing a “popular insurrection”.

Recent polls have shown Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly Front National), on course to beat Macron’s En Marche! In the European parliamentary elections in May.

The irony, writes Van Renterghem, is that Llke his centrists cousins Barack Obama and Matteo Renzi before him, “the most anti-populist leader France could have hoped for finds himself actually reinforcing populism”.

Others believe his thrusting reform agenda will ultimately pay off, and he need only stay firm to win in the long-term.

Henry Samuel in the Daily Telegraph writes that “his business-friendly measures have been slow in gaining traction while more “social” measures like abolishing housing tax are only kicking in now”.

As Le Point magazine pointed out this week, this is crunch time over whether he will end up France’s Thatcher or Francois Hollande, his hapless Socialist predecessor who, in the end, was too unpopular to run for re-election.

Eurosceptic parties are poised for significant growth in their representation at the European Parliament, a survey of national opinion polls suggests.

Between them, they are forecast to end up with about 60% more MEPs after next May’s elections, winning 122 of the 705 seats.

The snapshot of polls is “rough and ready”, says Reuters, but nevertheless “indicates a clear strengthening for movements outside the mainstream”. It will pile further “pressure on EU leaders pressing for deeper integration after Brexit”.

The numbers reflect the popularity of anti-establishment parties at national level across Europe. These include Italy’s 5-Star Movement and The League, now in a governing coalition, as well as Alternative for Germany, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly the Nation Front) and Geert Wilders’ Dutch Freedom Party.

And the challenge to Brussels may intensify. Steve Bannon, the architect behind Donald Trump’s shock 2016 presidential win, is planning to launch a new “movement” to coordinate and bolster the anti-EU vote, and has reportedly met a series of European right-wing leaders including Le Pen, Alice Weidel of Alternative for Germany, Hungary's Viktor Orban and former UKIP leader Nigel Farage.

Bannon also announced plans to develop a new “supergroup” within the European parliament, The Independent reports. He expressed the hope that it would attract up to a third of MPs after the elections next May and hold real sway over future direction of the bloc.

However, says Reuters, capturing more than 15-20% of the European Parliament for parties firmly hostile to the EU “looks from the survey evidence to be an uphill struggle for the former White House strategist”.

The EU’s main Eurosceptic parties are currently spread across several transnational party groupings in the Parliament.

New party alignments in the next EU legislature will depend heavily on horse-trading after the elections, but if a unified anti-EU group were to emerge its numbers would be offset by the loss of UKIP, whose 19 MEPs will leave when Britain quits the EU in March.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has proposed changing her party’s name from Front National (National Front) to Rassemblement National (National Rally).

Le Pen announced the rebranding plan during a members’ conference in the northern town of Lille on Sunday, saying the party - founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 1972 - needed a name that “supported the nation”, as part of a “wider makeover”.

“We were originally a protest party,” she said. “There should be no doubt now that we can be a ruling party.”

The idea of changing the party’s name was only approved by a narrow majority of National Front members at the conference, at 52%, says France 24.

All party members will now have the chance to take part in a postal vote to have their say, according to Reuters.

Le Pen, who became leader of the National Front in 2011, has already expelled her father from the party over his Holocaust denial, but “wants to take further steps to shake off the stigma of the party’s xenophobic past before the 2019 European Parliament election”, reports Politico

Her father has described the prospect of a name change as “political suicide”.

Meanwhile, critics have pointed out that the new name, National Rally, bears a striking similarity to the National Popular Rally, a French group that advocated collaborating with the Nazis during the Second World War.

The founder and former leader of France’s far-right Front National has said plans to change its name amount to political suicide.

Jean-Marine Le Pen warned his daughter, who now leads the party, that she risks cutting herself off from the party’s grass roots with her radical rebranding plan.

Marine Le Pen, who dropped the Front National brand during her failed presidential bid last year, will ask members to agree to replace the name, which insiders say puts off potential voters and is an obstacle to alliances with other groups.

While she was soundly beaten by Emmanuel Macron in the second-round run-off, Le Pen still shocked many in France by winning a third of total votes, one of the biggest electoral successes by a far-right party in post-war Europe.

Speaking to Reuters, the elder Le Pen, who led the FN for nearly four decades and lost a presidential run-off against Jacques Chirac in 2002, said: “This initiative is suicidal. That would be so for a company, and that is obviously also the case in politics.”

“It takes years, decades, to build a credible political name,” he added. “Wanting to change it is ... inexplicable.”

Le Pen father and daughter “have been at odds since she kicked him out of the party in 2015 in a bid to distance herself from his frequent inflammatory remarks, which put off a large part of the electorate”.

Since the election she has dropped her unpopular anti-euro stance and refocused the party on migration and security. Now it appears she wants to go one step further and consign some of her father’s divisive legacy to history.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right Front National, has claimed she is the victim of a “banking fatwa” after her personal accounts were closed, along with those of her party.

Le Pen, who lost the presidential run-off to Emmanuel Macron in May, accused “financial oligarchies” of trying to “suffocate” the political opposition and democracy.

HSBC shut down a bank account Le Pen has held for 25 years just a day after Societe Generale, France’s second-largest bank, asked the Front National to close all its accounts after a 30-year relationship.

“After being the victim of massive judicial persecution, we are witnessing a new stage in the persecution of the National Front - banishment from banking,” Le Pen told a press conference.

Her claim of “judicial persecution” was a reference to the decision by parliament earlier this month to strip her of immunity from prosecution for tweeting pictures of atrocities committed by the Islamic State group.

“Under French law, banks are allowed to close accounts unilaterally”, so long as they provide notice in advance, says the BBC. HSBC and Societe Generale have neither confirmed nor denied closing the accounts, citing banking confidentiality, according to Reuters.

HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, has in the past been criticised for closing the accounts of small business customers and charities. Its latest decision “comes amid heightened scrutiny of political accounts”, donations and money laundering, says The Guardian.

Reviving an old campaign tactic, Le Pen sought to suggest the banking establishment was trying to “silence the voices” of almost 11 million people who voted for her in May. She pledged to sue both HSBC and Societe Generale for discrimination.

“This isn’t the first time Le Pen’s party has had trouble with banks,” says Politico. According to the BBC, in 2014 the Front National accepted Russian loans of €11m when French banks declined to lend it any money.

It was also refused loans to fund its campaign for the presidency, and has subsequently appealed directly to supporters for loans.

Since it lost the presidential election to Macron, the Front National has been beset by infighting, which culminated in Le Pen’s right-hand man and friend Florian Philippot stepping down as vice president in September.

Emmanuel Macron will be the next president of France after a decisive win over his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen, winning 66.06 per cent of the vote to his rival's 33.94 per cent.

Europe has "breathed a sigh of relief" over the election of the centrist pro-European, says Reuters, as politicians and financial markets set aside fears of an anti-EU Le Pen victory.

At 39, Macron will be the youngest person ever to hold the presidency and the first in decades not to come from either of the country's major parties.

Addressing supporters last night, he said: "A new chapter in our long history has opened this evening. I would like it to be one of hope and of renewed confidence."

Conceding defeat, Le Pen vowed to lead her Front National party to the upcoming legislative election, but warned it would be undergoing a "profound transformation".

"It is not immediately clear what she means by this," says The Guardian, "but commentators are suggesting she aims to disband the party and build a new movement, aiming to organise a major political reorganisation around the divide between patriots and globalists".

Despite her defeat, Le Pen's share of the vote was "a record performance" for the Front National and "underlined the scale of the divisions that Macron must now try to heal", Reuters says.

"More than four million people who voted on Sunday posted a blank ballot paper, a record for a presidential election," says Le Monde. Turnout was 74 per cent, the lowest since 1969.

Macron's next challenge is to secure a solid base in next month's legislative elections, which may prove difficult, says Mathieu Gallard of pollsters Ipsos.

Nearly half of Macron's voters wanted only to block a Le Pen victory, Gallard adds, while only 39 per cent say they will be comfortable with hgim securing an absolute majority in the new parliament.

Paris's annual May Day union march descended into violent clashes between police and protesters yesterday, as tensions ran high in France as it chooses its next president.

Six riot police were injured following clashes with around 150 people armed with sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails. One received third-degree burns to the hand and face, while another officer was wounded in the hand by a stinger grenade. More than 9,000 armed police and soldiers were called in to manage the protests.

According to the Daily Telegraph, loud explosions, apparently from large firecrackers, were heard across Paris, while riot police surrounded and used teargas on the 150-strong group, who lobbed firebombs and missiles.

Interior minister Matthias Fekl condemned the protesters as "professional vandals" who had come "to injure and kill police officers".

Police said around 142,000 people attended May Day marches across the country. Many used the celebration of workers' rights to protest against Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate who goes head-to-head with Emmanuel Macron in the final presidential vote on 7 May.

It is the first time in history that neither of the two main parties, the Socialists or the Republicans, will be in the final round of the election.

Those set against a Le Pen presidency are wondering whether to vote blank, abstain or vote for Macron, a division visible on Monday, The Guardian says. "Even before the violence, the march had got off on the wrong foot," adds the paper, with two unions splitting off from the main demonstration in the morning to hold a separate demonstration in the capital.

One union banner is said to have read: "Neither plague nor cholera," over the choice of candidates, the Telegraph reports.

Marine Le Pen has resigned as leader of the Front National, saying she needs to be "above partisan considerations" in her battle for the French presidency.

"Tonight, I am no longer the president of the Front National. I am the presidential candidate," she said, a day after making it through to the second-round of the election.

In her campaign speeches, Le Pen has consistently said she is not a candidate of the far-right party and that her policies are hers alone.

"[She] has worked to bring in voters from the left and right for several years, cleaning up her party's racist, anti-Semitic image to do so," says the Associated Press.

However, it is expected she will resume her position as leader as "the French term she used signalled that the move to step aside would be temporary", the BBC says.

Following Sunday's result, Le Pen and centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron will face the final vote on 7 May.

Macron is widely tipped to win the election, after politicians from the Socialist and Republican parties eliminated in the first round of voting, despite having dominated French politics for decades, came together to urge voters to reject Le Pen's far-right policies.

"Only the defeated far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, pointedly refused to endorse Macron, saying he needed to consult his base first," The Guardian says.

Le Pen attacked her centrist rival, calling him a "hysterical, radical Europeanist".

Emmanuel Macron will face the Front National's Marine Le Pen for the French presidency after topping the country's first round of voting

Macron, a fresh-faced 39-year-old who began the race as a rank outsider, secured 24 per cent of the vote to become the moderates' hope to keep Le Pen out of the Elysees Palace in the second and final round of voting on 7 May.

A banker who served as a financial adviser in President Francois Hollande's administration in 2012, until Sunday Macron had never run for elected office.

It has also been a remarkable race for Le Pen, whose efforts to detoxify the party she inherited from her father have paid off in spectacular fashion, winning the Front National 21.9 per cent of the first round vote, which was its best performance ever.

The surge in support for a nationalist, xenophobic party "incompatible with our values" is a "warning for the state of our democracy", says French daily Le Monde, and "must trigger… a stern rebuttal" from French voters next month.

Macron and Le Pen are the embodiment of the current state of France, politically polarised by gaping economic inequality, says Le Figaro's Mathieu Slama.

Macron's electorate is the France which is doing well, making money, hopeful for the future, he writes, meanwhile "Le Pen's France is the France that suffers, that worries about making ends meet at the end of the month."

But irrespective of whether it is Macron or Le Pen who ultimately triumphs, with the two major political parties shut out of the race for the first time in modern French history, "France is set upon a new political course", says The Guardian.

But it does leave French voters with a clear choice between hope and hate, says the paper: "France must stand up again in two weeks’ time and complete the job by electing Mr Macron."

But, although early polls are predicting a landslide victory over Le Pen next month, nothing is guaranteed, says Le Parisien.

In the final days of the campaign, Macron's lead over fellow candidates Francois Fillon and Jean-Luc Melenchon shrank dramatically as Macron-mania gave way to anxieties about his meteoric rise and glibly centrist platform.

With those questions still unanswered, "Macron knows he can't afford to put a foot wrong", says the paper.

France's presidential rivals will tonight take to the stage for a televised debate in an election that has got the rest of Europe hooked.

While past elections have been a "two-horse race" between the Socialists and the Republicans, neither of those parties is likely to advance past the first rounds this year.

Francois Hollande's "disastrous" presidency has left his Socialist Party "in tatters", says the Daily Telegraph, while a nepotism scandal involving his Republican rival Francois Fillon has left a vacuum in the political right which moderates fear could be exploited by populist candidate Marine Le Pen.

"Never has a French presidential election captivated so many international commentators before," says the New Statesman.

Eleven candidates are in the race, but only a handful stand a serious chance of victory. Currently, Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron are neck-and-neck at the top of the polls, both projected to pull in around a quarter of the vote.

Fillon lags behind with 17 to 20 per cent, while leftists Jean-Luc Melenchon and Benoit Hamon can expect to draw between ten and 16 per cent of the first-round vote.

While political analysts pore over the polls, France's voters remain impatient for answers to the country's major issues: a stagnating economy; a creaking welfare state, and the spectre of domestic terrorism.

How does the French system work?

France elects its president every five years in a two-round system. This year, the first vote falls on 23 April.

If no candidate wins more than 50 per cent of that vote - and given that it is not unusual to see a dozen or more candidates on the ballot paper, so an outright majority is highly improbable - the top two face off in the second and final vote, which takes place on 7 May.

Who are the candidates - and what do they stand for?

Emmanuel Macron, En Marche!: A former banker who served as a finance minister under Hollande before forming his own party in 2015, Macron claims he is "neither of the left not the right".

He started the race as an outsider, but Fillon's campaign-sinking nepotism scandal transformed him into the moderates' hope to keep Le Pen out of the Elysee Palace.

Macron's youthful charisma and slick brand of socially progressive but business-friendly centrism have attracted comparisons with Tony Blair, Justin Trudeau and Barack Obama. Crucially, after a year of Trump and Brexit, victory "would point to a future for centrist, pro-European politics", says The Guardian.

Marine Le Pen, Front National: Le Pen inherited the nationalist party from her father, founder Jean Marie Le Pen. While the Eurosceptic populist remains a controversial figure, due to her inflammatory rhetoric on Muslims, immigrants and refugees, she has tried to soften the party's hard-right image, notably by backing same-sex marriage.

Francois Fillon, Les Republicains: The conservative candidate has spent most of election season embroiled in a protracted scandal concerning his British wife Penelope's lucrative job on the public payroll, resulting in pleas from his own party to step aside.

Fillon has vowed to kick-start France's stagnating economy by cutting red tape, raising the retirement age to 65 and reducing the size of the government by cutting 500,000 civil service jobs.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, La France Insoumise: Like Macron, Melenchon quit his previous party, the Left, to start his own grassroots political movement. La France Insoumise (Unsubmissive France) offers a radical socialist platform, including a 32-hour working week, wealth redistribution and a universal basic income.

His candidacy is expected to split the left-wing vote in the first round of voting, meaning that both Melenchon and the Socialist Party's Benoit Hamon are unlikely to progress to the run-offs.

Benoit Hamon, Parti Socialiste: The Socialist Party is facing an uphill battle against the overwhelming unpopularity of Hollande – although his 22 per cent approval rating is a marked improvement from last year's low of four per cent.

Hamon's pro-worker, pro-environment platform overlaps significantly with Melenchon's, to the point that tens of thousands signed a petition calling on the pair to form a left-wing coalition, although no alliance ever materialised.

Infographic by www.statista.com for TheWeek.co.uk.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte's victory over Eurosceptic, anti-Islam Geert Wilders comes as a "huge relief to other EU governments facing a wave of nationalism", writes the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Netherlands' election was widely seen as a litmus test for the strength of anti-establishment populism ahead of upcoming votes in France and Germany later this year.

However, says The Guardian, it is too soon to applaud a return to political normalcy.

France holds its first round of general election votes on April 23, with a run-off two weeks later on May 7 if no candidate receives more than 50 per cent support.

According to CNN, a series of terrorist attacks, along with an influx of refugees, has pushed right-wing leader Marine Le Pen into the front.

It will be "the real bellwether election," writes Cornell University's professor Mabel Berezin, adding: "That is where the populist action is and that is what we should be focusing upon."

While Le Pen, the anti-EU leader of the populist National Front, leads in the polls, Francois Fillon will attempt to keep the centre-right vote for the Republicans.

Meanwhile, centrist Emmanuel Macron, a former banker who founded his political movement, En Marche!, two years ago, promising to heal France's ethnic and economic tensions, is hoping to sweep up votes both left and right.

In Germany, however, the sun may have already set on the potential for a populist uprising.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door policy to one million refugees in 2015 led to a huge backlash and a sudden explosion in support for the nationalist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

But support has dipped and tensions have calmed since a Turkish-EU pact curbed the flow of migrants.

Last month, one German pollster suggested populism's biggest triumph - Donald Trump - may also prove its downfall.

"The chaotic leadership of US President Donald Trump, who was at first celebrated, is tending to cause alarm given the crises around the world," Manfred Guellner told Reuters.

Infographic by Statista.com for TheWeek.co.uk

EU politicians have voted to lift French far-right leader Marine Le Pen's immunity so she can be prosecuted for tweeting gruesome images of Islamic State violence, including the beheading of a US journalist.

Members of the legal affairs committee voted by 18 to three in favour of the politician losing her immunity, saying of the images: "It is beyond question that their violent nature is likely to undermine human dignity. Their publication therefore warrants the opening of criminal proceedings."

The decision was confirmed by the European parliament yesterday, following a request from a French prosecutor. Le Pen could face three years in jail if she is charged and found guilty.

"Le Pen may calculate that this is an issue that will do her no harm with hard-right supporters of her party, the Front National," says the BBC's Kevin Connolly.

This is not the first time she has lost her diplomatic immunity, which is given to MEPs to ensure free speech. She previously lost her parliamentary privilege in 2013, over comments she made about Muslims. She was prosecuted in 2015 with "incitement to discrimination over people's religious beliefs", for comparing Muslims praying in public to the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, Reuters reports. "Prosecutors eventually recommended the charges be dropped."

The latest controversy follows a separate scandal surrounding Le Pen's alleged misuse of EU funds. She "has been asked to pay back more than $320,000 [£260,000] to the European parliament because two of her aides in Brussels were actually working for her campaign in France", NPR reports. "She has denied any wrongdoing."

What did the tweets contain?

In late 2014, Le Pen posted a series of vitriolic tweets that included photographs of killings by IS, writing: "Daesh [IS's Arabic name] is THIS!" The posts drew revulsion and criticism from bereaved families and French politicians across the political spectrum.

She defended the posts by saying she had merely wanted to condemn the barbaric practices of the terror group.

"I'm a lawmaker. I'm in my role when I condemn Daesh. This is my role," she told French TV station LCP. "If I don't fulfill my role, I'm worth nothing as a lawmaker.

"Nobody can prevent a representative of the Republic from condemning Daesh's acts of violence."

France 24 says Le Pen "has so far refused to attend a police interview over the investigation… citing her status as a member of the European parliament".

Will she be prosecuted?

It is unclear whether prosecutors will take legal action before this year's presidential elections, which will be held in two rounds in April and May.

Under French law, the maximum penalty for distributing violent images is three years in prison and a fine of up to €75,000 (£64,000).

The French presidential election could be heading for a “nail-bitingly” close finish if incumbent Emmanuel Macron and his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen face off in second-round voting.

The French president’s late entry into the contest and “refusal” to debate presidential candidates means that Le Pen has “gained on him to such an extent” that aides are “now genuinely alarmed he could lose a race that looked predictable just a few weeks ago”, The Telegraph said.

The first round of voting will take place this Sunday, and if Macron and Le Pen are the highest scoring candidates they could face an extremely close second round.

Macron presidency

Five years ago, Macron, aged just 39, “stormed” his way to the French presidency after an “energetic campaign in which his supporters knocked on doors across the country asking voters what they wanted”, said the Financial Times (FT).

But as he seeks a second term in office, his closest aides worry that he has spent too much time on diplomatic efforts over the war in Ukraine and become a “distant establishment figure who is failing to engage with voters”.

Despite an initial boost thanks to his attempts to broker peace with Vladimir Putin, many French voters now feel Macron is “a typical politician from the Paris elite who deserves to be taken down a peg or two”, the paper added.

He has presided over several political “storms” during his five years in office, said France 24 – “some were of his own making, while others barrelled over the horizon unannounced”.

His first year in office saw some of the most violent anti-government demonstrations since the 1960s when protesters in fluorescent yellow safety jackets (gilets jaunes) began a “nationwide revolt” against efforts to introduce major tax and labour market reforms.

Then, at the beginning of 2020, came the world’s “once-in-a-century” battle with the Covid-19 pandemic, “rendering almost all other government business irrelevant and putting paid to his last reform plans”.

He has also faced criticism for his “abrasive and sometimes authoritarian” style, the broadcaster added. Some “off-the-cuff” comments made to members of the public have forged a reputation for “arrogance and insensitivity” including one infamous occasion when he told an unemployed gardener that he could “cross the road and get you a job”.

It was these comments, alongside pursuing a policy of tax cuts for the wealthy, that were the “fuel” for the 2018 gilets jaunes protests, said journalist Nicolas Domenach, who wrote a book on the president entitled Macron: Why So Much Hatred?.

“Not only did we have a ‘president of the rich’, but a president of contempt and arrogance,” he said. “It cut through. It was like he was branded with it, with hot iron.”

Macron has a “record of achievement, most notably in the economic sphere”, said former Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable in The Independent.

He has “disproved George W. Bush’s put-down that “there is no word for entrepreneur in French”, he added. “Tax and employment law reforms have energised France’s small business and start-up culture”, and there are indications that the economy is “recovering strongly post-pandemic, compared with both Germany and the UK”.

His other achievement has been to “embed pride in France’s European identity”, Cable said, banishing the spectre of an exit from the EU “even on the nationalist fringes”.

Chances of winning

Right-wing nationalist Le Pen is closing in on Macron as France prepares for its first round of voting.

According to a Harris poll, Macron has “lost a further two points in voting intentions in the first round in the past week”, reported The Times, putting him at 26.5% of the vote share, while Le Pen has gained two points at 23%.

And if the pair face each other in a run-off, Le Pen is polling “closer than she has ever been” to Macron, on 48.5% compared with his 51.5%.

Le Pen has “benefited from a successful drive to soften her xenophobic image”, as well as a decline in support for “anti-Islam pundit” Eric Zemmour, the paper said. Her campaign “focused on the key issue of living costs”, while “playing down” her Russian links.

Macron has also been accused of “dodging debate” ahead of the first round of voting, “snubbing a high-profile TV appearance just as a new opinion poll showed Le Pen in her strongest position yet”, said The Telegraph.

He has “repeatedly refused” to debate other candidates, the paper added, arguing that no sitting French president has done so previously. But his “relative absence” on the campaign trail has no doubt “contributed to a slide in his ratings”.

Nevertheless, Macron is still “on track to win”, said the FT. “He has the advantage of incumbency”, the paper added, as well as being “prominent on the world stage” and “an effective leader during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”.

Political background

Until five years ago, Macron was a little-known entity in French politics. A former member of the Socialist cabinet, he established his own party, En Marche!, in 2016 to challenge the status quo.

Macron, now 44, was educated at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration in Strasbourg before working as an investment banker, during which a well-timed deal with Nestle and Pfizer made him a millionaire.

After being a member of the Socialist Party from 2006 to 2009, he ran as an independent candidate and served as an economy minister under Francois Hollande from 2014. He resigned in August 2016 to establish En Marche! (On The Move)

Positioning himself as a “transpartisan” centrist, Macron’s party has defined itself against the aged definitions of left and right-wing politics to create a “third way” solution popularised by the likes of former UK prime minister Tony Blair.

“I want to reconcile the two Frances that have been growing apart for too long,” he said in 2017. Unlike the other frontrunners in the presidential elections, Macron is pro-EU and has expressed a desire to focus on building a stronger relationship with Germany.

What about outside of politics?

Macron met his wife Brigitte Trogneux, 24 years his senior, when she was his French teacher at school. They announced their status as a couple when he was 18 and they married in 2007.

The couple live with Trogneux’s three children from her previous marriage. She retired from teaching in 2016 to help with Macron’s presidential campaign.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, launched her campaign for the French presidency with attacks on radical Islam and globalisation.

During a rally with supporters in Lyon, Le Pen also vowed to renegotiate France's position within the European Union, saying she will call a referendum on membership of the EU if those negotiations fail.

"What is at stake in this election is the continuity of France as a free nation, our existence as a people," she said.

Le Pen's campaign promises indicate that she is "convinced that Trump and the Brexit vote in Britain point to the return of nationalism, while recent domestic events in France's unpredictable election race could also help her", The Local reports.

Her campaign launch comes amid one of the most unpredictable elections in decades for France. The race has been "thrown wide open" by allegations the leading centre-right candidate Francois Fillon "paid his wife and children close to €1m [£860,000] of public money for parliamentary assistance jobs that investigators suspect she did not do", reports The Guardian.

While the election had been seen as a two-horse race between Le Pen and Fillon, the latter's expenses scandal has boosted the chances of 39-year-old independent centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron.

Le Pen is tipped to "win the first round of the presidential contest", says the BBC, but will struggle in the second round run-offs because "her rivals have always managed to attract votes from other parties; Marine Le Pen has not".

Even one of Le Pen's advisers conceded to The Local: "On paper, Macron has the strongest chance of winning."