With Emmanuel Macron's party badly lagging behind the French far right in opinion polls ahead of June's European Parliament election, the president hopes a set-piece speech on Europe on Thursday can help to close the gap.
Returning to Paris's Sorbonne university, where he made a landmark 2017 speech on driving forward the European Union, Macron is sticking to "his brand" which "remains our base and the base we want to mobilise", one minister told AFP on Friday.
