The French president Emmanuel Macron is aiming to kickstart his re-election campaign this week with walkabouts outside Paris and a big rally in the capital, after the diplomatic pressures of the war in Ukraine limited his canvassing at home – leading to a dip in the polls and worries of a low turn-out.
Macron, 44, is hoping next month to be the first French president to win re-election in 20 years, but he has recently dropped two to three points in the polls as the gap between him and the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen narrows. While he remains favourite, the next 10 days of campaigning are seen as fraught and risky amid anger over the cost of living, disillusionment with the level of campaign debate and politics in general.
“I adore rallies but let’s be clear-headed – I can’t do many!” Macron recently said on TV, explaining that he had instead been at international summits and engaged in diplomacy on Ukraine. “No one would understand if I wasn’t there to protect the French.”
Macron, after sweeping to power in 2017 promising to transform France with a new brand of politics that was neither left nor right, is polling at about 27% in the first round, followed by Le Pen on about 17%. Le Pen is gaining ground after campaigning hard on France’s cost of living crisis.
But if Macron faces Le Pen in the final round runoff on 24 April, the result is predicted to be much closer than when he won five years ago with 66%, with one poll this week putting Macron at 53% to Le Pen’s 47%.
A third candidate, the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is also steadily rising, and abstention could be as high as 30%. Of those who say they will vote, four in 10 are still not sure for whom – adding to a greater degree of unpredictability.
Most French voters trust Macron to lead on the issue of war in Ukraine, which initially appeared to cement his position, and at campaign events will regularly says he’s off to speak to a world leader on the phone straight afterwards. His presidential rivals on the right and left however accuse him of ducking the political debate at home.
When Macron rolled up his shirtsleeves and went for his first walkabout to meet the public in Burgundy this week, he was met by complaints about fuel prices, the cost of living and shouts of “We’re taxed all year round!”. He said France had spent €20bn (£17bn) in measures to help those who were struggling and “France has done more than its neighbours”.
Macron’s challenge in the coming days is to drum up enthusiasm for his election platform. Polls show that the manifesto details that have stuck in voters minds are his measures on the right – raising the retirement age to 65 and requiring unemployed people to undertake 15 to 20 hours of work or training a week. Macron’s support on the centre-left – which was crucial for his election in 2017 – has dipped, while his support on the centre-right has risen.
But after promising novelty and fresh ideas at the last presidential election, a recent Elabe poll found that, this time, fewer than one in five people thought Macron’s programme was innovative.
Analysts say Macron – whose early labour and tax reforms saw him labelled “president of the rich” – must show he is listening to people on the ground, and their concerns. On a recent local radio phone-in, one woman working in the health service told Macron she felt he “wasn’t there for us”. Afterwards, in a behind-the-scenes video for his campaign, he lamented that she felt that way saying he’d heard the same kind of comment “in lots of places”.
Opposition figures, including Le Pen, Mélenchon and the far-right TV pundit Éric Zemmour, have attacked Macron over a senate report that French ministries have more than doubled spending on international consultancy firms, including the US firm McKinsey, between 2018 and last year.
Macron’s government has been accused of paying millions for advice on what was criticised as a slow rollout of Covid vaccines. The Green party candidate, Yannick Jadot, called it indecent to pay private consultants. Macron said all contracts respected the rules.
Stewart Chau, a sociologist and consultant at the pollsters Viavoice, said Macron’s current polling remained higher than his first-round score five years ago of 24%.
Chau said Macron faced a challenge: “The international crisis has allowed him to rest on his presidential stature and legitimacy on the world stage. But, in the tight timeframe of the campaign, he still has to create an effect of ‘desirability’ among voters. He has to both say ‘I’m the right person for the current international context’ and at the same time elicit some positive emotion from voters, with proposals seen as improving people’s lives. That double situation is not easy.”
