Emmanuel macron

It was the 34th annual convention of France's Muslims at the weekend in le Bourget, just north of Paris, and the main topic of conversation was the upcoming presidential election. Five years ago, when François Hollande beat Nicolas Sarkozy to become president, the Socialist candidate benefited from 86 per cent of the Muslim vote. That won't happen in 2017. Jérôme Fourquet, director of IFOP, the international polling organisation, said recently that in the wake of the 2012 election 'the left committed the error of believing that they had acquired this [Muslim] electorate permanently'. And yet in Benoît Hamon, who hopes to succeed Hollande as the next president from the Socialist Party, Islam has a friend.

Some people in Britain may be somewhat confused by Emmanuel Macron, leading candidate in the French presidential election, now just days away from the first round of voting. Who is he? What does he stand for? As polls claim that the former economy minister in the government of François Hollande is likely to be the next president of the republic, it is time for a wider audience to understand the fundamental beliefs that underpin Macron’s candidacy. Is he a man of the left, or the right? Or neither? Or both? Is political and economic liberalism a fundamental value of the left? What is his view on French culture? On trees and fish? Does money eat? Or breathe? Devote just a minute and a half to this captivating video and all will be perfectly clear.

President François Hollande was unable to fix France during his presidency, now expiring. Can he fix the French election by choosing his successor?  Unable to run for a second term because of the problem French voters loathe him, Mr Hollande has told friends his final mission is to prevent the election of Marine Le Pen, candidate of the populist National Front.  A consummate political plotter, Mr Hollande has adroitly — and not even especially covertly — anointed as his successor his former aide and economy minister, the supposedly brilliant and boyish, if slightly odd, Emmanuel Macron. Macron is a former Rothschild banker, a graduate of the elite École Nationale d’Administration, and 39.

Marine Le Pen sees plots everywhere. In her view the media, the Socialists, the judiciary and even the European Union have been conniving in recent months to enfeeble her presidential campaign. As she said during last week's televised debate, 'I'm politically persecuted'. But the plot with the potential to cause the greatest damage to the National Front leader is likely to come from within. It will be led by her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, and her growing number of supporters within the National Front who believe Marine Le Pen's detoxification of the party she inherited from her father in 2011 has softened their core beliefs to an unacceptable degree.

The presidential campaign is nothing if not a test of endurance for the French public although there were moments yesterday evening when the televised debate felt more like a punishment. For four hours, the eleven candidates talked, or to be more precise, shouted, interrupted and ranted at one another. It was, in the words of Le Figaro, a 'cacophony' and one that 'rapidly turned the debate into a confusion'. It was the first time in a presidential campaign that all the candidates, not just the principal ones, have debated and it will probably be the last.

It was the burkini that brought Monday night's debate to life between the five main presidential candidates for next month's French election. For the first hour of the televised debate there had been much posturing and postulating but no sharp exchanges. That changed when Marine Le Pen accused Emmanuel Macron of turning a blind eye to the burkini, the Islamic swimwear that last summer caused such controversy in France. Macron rejected the charge, telling Le Pen in a forceful exchange she was a dangerous provocateur. The centrist candidate, who claims to be 'neither left nor right', then went on the counter-attack, accusing the National Front leader of sowing divisions within society by attempting to make four million French Muslims 'enemies of the Republic'.

'One cannot govern France,' declared François Fillon last November, 'if one is not irreproachable.' A little over three months later, however, and the centre-right candidate for next month's French presidential candidate has had a change of heart. The 62-year-old has today announced that he will be placed under formal investigation over allegations that during a period of several years he fictitiously employed three members of his family on lucrative salaries. François Fillon and his Welsh wife Penelope have been summoned by magistrates to answer the charges on 15 March, two days before the registration deadline for presidential candidates. Fillon says it is clearly a politically-motivated decision.

If you believe the hype, Emmanuel Macron is l’anti-Trump. He is what the inter-national centre-left, reeling from the shocks of Brexit and the US election and fearful of a victory for Marine Le Pen in France, is crying out for: a politician who can win again. He is only 39 years old, handsome and radical sounding. He’s not a career politico; he used to work as a banker for the Rothschilds (every-body loves them). He wears sharp suits and he’s written a book called Révolution. Better still, he has a buzzing movement behind him: his ‘En Marche!’ (Let’s go!) campaign has excited trendy progressives. He is not bogged down with formal connections to the loathed establishment.

As Emmanuel Macron stood on the steps of Downing Street on Tuesday urging Britain's 'banks, talents, researchers, academics' to move across the Channel after Brexit, security services in France were dismantling yet another Islamic terror cell preparing to launch a terrorist attack. That makes three this month, a clear indication that the Islamists are itching to carry out a major attack in the run-up to April's presidential election. Tuesday's police raid targeted addresses in Clermont, Marseille and the Paris area. 'The suspects had a plot that was sufficiently advanced for the police to decide to arrest them', said a police spokesman.

On this week’s episode, we consider Marine Le Pen’s path to power in France, whether we allow posh people to bluff their way to success, and why men aren’t 'lunging' at women in Ubers. The first round of the French presidential election will be held at the end of April, and, after a turbulent couple of months that has seen establishment candidates dropping like, well, establishment candidates, the polls favour a run-off between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Macron, a 39-year-old independent candidate seen as another ‘heir to Blair’, is all that stands between the Front National and government, a terrifying prospect for liberal France.