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France presidential election 2022: close race expected between Macron and Le Pen in first round – live

Follow the latest updates as polls predict a tight first round finish between the president, Emmanuel Macron, and Marine Le Pen, from the far-right National Rally

  • Macron and Le Pen vie closely for presidency as voters cast ballots
  • From cat lover Le Pen to far right’s red card: five key moments

My colleague Kim Willsher spent the last couple of days on the trail with Marine Le Pen during the closing moments of her first round campaign, speaking to her voters and reflecting on how the far-right leader had changed the image the public has of both her and her party:

Marine Le Pen took over what was then the Front National in 2011 and set about laundering its image, tarnished by xenophobic neo-Nazi thugs with shaven heads and jackboots. Members were expelled for racist and antisemitic remarks or for defending Philippe Pétain, head of France’s Nazi-collaborating Vichy government in the 1940s. She even threw out her own father in 2015.

She renamed the party the National Rally. It has stopped calling for the death penalty and for France to leave the EU. She continues to champion nationalistic “French first” discrimination, but there is also a commitment to more left-leaning economics, including increases in pensions, opposition to the privatisation of public services, and protectionism as an alternative to globalisation. She does not propose zero immigration, and has abandoned the party’s opposition to marriage equality and abortion.

The arguments around her incompetence or lack of knowledge no longer seem to hold water at a time when parts of France consider her to be completely presidential and close to the people, and no more worrying than other candidates.

For many French people, the Le Pen name is no longer viewed with disdain. If, as expected, Le Pen does enough to reach the second round on 24 April, Macron will face the biggest political fight of his career to keep her out of the Élysée Palace.

Le Pen’s economic programme is an incoherent mess. Her European policy is Frexit by stealth – unilaterally reducing payments to the EU budget and breaking EU laws she does not like. She also wants to ban all Muslim women from wearing veils in public.

The opinion polls suggest that if enough leftwing voters stay at home in the second round, refusing to choose between Macron (“the president of the rich”) and a seemingly “kinder, gentler” Le Pen, then she could win. Just.

France is an angry country. It is always an angry country. It is especially angry at present because the Ukraine war has inflated already high petrol, diesel and food prices. But there is no real appetite in France for confrontational policies that would destroy an 80-year postwar political consensus of outward-looking tolerance and European unity …

Continue reading…

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