Before the French go to the polls on Sunday, April 10, all eyes are on the country’s politics – on its past and its future. According to Douglas Murray, the one question voters will be asking is which candidate can make space for revolution, which is what the people truly want. Mr Macron, the political commentator argues, is “incapable” of that and of “almost anything” and has made the Elysées an “arrogant government”.
The race for the top job in Europe’s second-largest economy appears to be coming down, once again, to the two finalists of the 2017 election.
Far-right challenger Marine Le Pen has managed to narrow the gap separating her from the president, with final polls showing the two candidates are most likely to reach a second-round runoff on April 24 are Macron and Le Pen.
The latest OpinionWay-Kea Partners poll shows the race is getting cosy.
Ms Le Pen, at 22 percent for the first round, is not far from Mr Macron’s 26 percent.
FRENCH ELECTIONS: Marine Le Pen gains ground on ‘feverish’ Macron as final stages loom
Hard-left rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon is gaining support, too, as he has steadily risen to 17 percent.
An Ifop poll showed a similar direction, with Mr Macron having lost part of his 30 percent peak in March to settle at 26.5 percent, while Ms Le Pen has risen to 24 percent.
In 2017, Mr Murray wrote that “the presence of Le Pen was the best possible way for Macron to reach power”.
Ms Le Pen’s family’s unpopularity, as well as Mr Macron’s fresh arrival into the political scene, he said, were key in granting him almost two-thirds of the vote to Le Pen’s one third.
When he won, “the usual expectation of change” came from the French – on which he did not deliver, Mr Murray penned in a Telegraph op-ed.
In the past four months, Macron has had over a dozen conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as hours of internal talks about Moscow’s attacks on Kyiv in Paris.
His numerous attempts to secure “a ceasefire and then the total withdrawal of troops” are clearly appreciated by world leaders, especially within the European Union, as France currently holds the rotating presidency of the bloc.
And this, the 44-year-old knows.
He said in an interview with Le Parisien of his efforts to stop Putin: “I’ve never been complacent. Which was not always the case for Marine Le Pen, who is financially dependent on Vladimir Putin and his regime and who has always been complacent with him.”
Mr Macron was referring to the €9m loan Ms Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, took out from a Russian bank in 2014 for a local election campaign.
Ms Le Pen responded to his remarks by saying they denoted “violence”, which she called proof the president is panicking.
But while the 53-year-old may have become an unmissable favourite in the political spectrum, according to Mr Murray, she is “simply too easy a figure to run against”.