Gavin Mortimer

Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen clash tomorrow evening in an eagerly anticipated live television debate. The president has been accused of dodging the presidential campaign but it doesn’t seem to have harmed his chances of re-election, with the latest poll giving him a handsome ten point lead over his rival. If Le Pen is to pull off a shock victory in Sunday’s second round she will need to debate with far more finesse than she did in 2017. On that occasion she was given the run-around by Macron as 16.5 million viewers looked on. The pressure on her is immense but her campaign team say she is upbeat and relishing the prospect of a rematch with her nemesis.

The cry of ‘aux barricades’ is reverberating around France as the country’s political elite rush to form a Republican Front. There is diversity in the ranks of those lining up to prevent Marine Le Pen reaching the Élysée. Communists, Capitalists and past presidents and prime ministers have mobilised for Emmanuel Macron ahead of the second round on Sunday week. Who would have thought France would see the day when Nicolas Sarkozy, President ‘Bling Bling’ as he was nicknamed during his time in office, would find common ground with Fabien Roussel, the Communist leader, or for that matter a pair of Socialists in former president François Hollande and his PM Manuel Valls?

So it’s Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen once again, and for many millions of French that is a deeply depressing prospect. There were violent protests in the Brittany city of Rennes shortly after the result of the first round of voting was announced, as an estimated 500 people vented their anger against ‘fascism’ and ‘capitalism’. Around the same time I received a call from my sister-in-law in the south of France. She was in despair, this working-class socialist, at once more being forced to choose between Macron and Le Pen. But it’s her ilk who will decide the outcome of the second round on 24 April. Jean-Luc Mélenchon received 21.9 per cent of the vote – approximately 7.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is on the march once more, rising up the polls and laying bare the ineptitude of the Socialist party. While their candidate in the presidential election, Anne Hidalgo, is stuck on two points, Mélenchon is on 17, behind only Marine Le Pen, on 23, and Emmanuel Macron on 26. It was a similar story in the 2017 election when the veteran left-winger received 19.6 per cent of votes in the first round, while the Socialist party’s Benoît Hamon mustered a risible 6 per cent. There’s a contradiction to Mélenchon in that while at 70 he is the oldest candidate in the race, he is the most technical savvy in getting his message across.

Emmanuel Macron is worried. This wasn’t how he had envisaged the election. A month ago the president of France held a staggering 18 point lead in the polls and, as he looked over his shoulder in the home straight, he could barely make out Marine Le Pen in the distance. Now the gap is four points and she is breathing down his neck as the finish line approaches. Le Pen is one of Europe’s more interesting politicians. The daughter of Jean-Marie, the founder of her National Front party – which she rebranded National Rally in 2018 – and the aunt of Marion Maréchal, she has always been considered something of a political second-rater.

Not for the first time in France the death of a Jew is dominating the news, and not for the first time there are whispers of an attempted cover-up. Several candidates in Sunday’s election have paused from their campaigning to air their views on the death of Jeremy Cohen, a 31-year-old who was struck by a tram in Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris. The candidates portrayed by the commentariat as ‘extreme right’ were the most direct. ‘Did he die because he was a Jew?’ tweeted Eric Zemmour, himself a Jew. ‘Why is this case hushed up?’ Marine Le Pen also wondered on social media if ‘what was presented as an accident could be an anti-Semitic murder’.

The latest poll has France’s socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo on 1.5 per cent. This is the party that won the presidential election a decade ago. Britain’s Labour party should look at the French socialists and be very afraid. This is what happens when a political party turns its back on its core electorate and instead panders to pet progressive policies, such as whether a woman can have a penis. Things have become so bad for Hidalgo that she now trails Fabien Roussel of the French Communist party. Named in honour of Colonel Fabien, a communist hero of the resistance in the second world war, Roussel caused a kerfuffle in January when he declared in an interview that ‘good wine, good meat, good cheese, for me this is French gastronomy’.

When the attacks commence it’s clear that Marine Le Pen’s enemies are unnerved. For months – actually make that five years – few have viewed the leader of the National Rally as a serious contender for the 2022 presidential election. I include myself among that number, having declared on Coffee House in September 2017 that Le Pen ‘has no future’. More fool me. Along with many others, I underestimated her tenacity, her resilience and her sheer bloody-mindedness in refusing to throw in the towel. Will her stubbornness be rewarded with a win against all expectation? There is gathering optimism in Le Pen’s camp that a political earthquake will be felt in France next month. Recent polls have detected a momentum shift.

It has been a torrid few days in France. In the early hours of Saturday morning, a former Argentine rugby international, Federico Aramburú, was shot dead on a chic Paris street after an altercation in a bar. The suspect is a notorious far-right activist who allegedly told Aramburú that he didn’t belong in France. On Monday Corsican nationalist Yvan Colonna died, three weeks after he was beaten into a coma by fellow prisoner and infamous extremist, Franck Elong Abé, an Islamist who was captured fighting for the Taliban a decade ago. It is alleged that Abé justified his attack on the grounds that Colonna ‘had bad-mouthed the Prophet’.

Emmanuel Macron unveiled his campaign manifesto in a carefully orchestrated press conference on Thursday and his pledges to cut taxes and reform the welfare system dominated the headlines on Friday morning. But the president also touched on defence, promising that spending – €32.3 billion when he came to power in 2017 – will rise to €50 billion by 2025. Some of that money will be invested in cyber warfare technology, as well, presumably, on ammunition; if reports are to be believed the French army would run out of ordnance after four days of a major war. It’s a favourite pastime of Anglophones to mock the French military, though only those who don’t know their history indulge in such juvenile antics.

A short war in Ukraine would not suit Emmanuel Macron. The longer it lasts the longer the president of France can project to his people the image of the implacable wartime leader. So far so good. If the polls are to be believed, next month’s presidential election is a foregone conclusion; the latest poll has Macron on 31 per cent, way in front of his closest rival, Marine Le Pen, on 18 per cent. Despite such a dominant lead over the rest of the field, Macron’s campaign team insist that they are on their guard against complacency. The president will unveil his programme in its entirety on Thursday, just over three weeks before voters go to the polls in the first round of voting, and in the meantime his minions are out in the field distributing pamphlets on his behalf.

The first British volunteers have arrived in Ukraine to ‘do their bit’ in thwarting the Russian invasion. According to reports in this morning’s newspapers, four serving soldiers are among them. Liz Truss must be heartened. The Foreign Secretary recently declared her support for any idealistic Briton wishing to head east to fight ‘for democracy’. Others were less enthusiastic at the prospect of Britons joining the war, notably Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, himself a former soldier. Also unenthused was Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the defence staff, who cautioned: ‘This isn't really something that you want to rush to in terms of the sound of gunfire. This is about sensible support based in the UK.

At the time it probably felt like a good idea for Marine Le Pen’s campaign team. A photo of her shaking hands with Vladimir Putin, taken when she met the Russian president in Moscow in 2017, would emphasise to the electorate that she was a serious player on the world stage. The photo was included in Le Pen’s campaign manifesto, over one million of which have been distributed the length and breadth of France. Now they are being hastily withdrawn by party members as Le Pen does her best to distance herself from the most despised man in the West. Le Pen is not the only presidential candidate to have been embarrassed by events in Ukraine.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine last week the western media has focused on little else. In Britain this concentration is understandable: the country has finally come out of Covid and there is a large gap to be filled on the airwaves and in the newspapers. Not so in France, still encumbered by Covid restrictions, where in just over five weeks voters go to the polls in the first round of the presidential election. As much as the French are troubled by events in Ukraine – a recent poll reported that 88 per cent of those canvassed were ‘shocked’ by the Russian invasion – they will vote on issues closer to home: the rising cost of living, immigration, the health service, and crime and violence.