Le Pen, Macron prepare for crunch French election duel

PARIS: French leader Emmanuel Macron and the farright’s Marine Le Pen were preparing Tuesday for a crunch presidential election debate, with supporters of the president warning against complacency despite a solid poll lead. Macron will go head-to-head with Le Pen late on Wednesday in their only direct clash ahead of Sunday’s second-round vote, an encounter set to be watched by millions of voters.

Some polls are predicting a lead of around 10 points for Macron over Le Pen in the run-off, a repeat of the 2017 election. But undecided voters and abstentions could yet swing the figures. Le Pen has cleared her diary to concentrate on preparing for the debate, hoping to avoid any repeat of the fiasco five years ago, when her ill-prepared performance contributed to her defeat at the hands of Macron.

This year’s vote will mark the closest the far right has been to seizing the Elysee presidential palace. Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie was crushed by Jacques Chirac in the 2002 run-off election, and she was easily beaten by Macron in 2017. The one-off live televised debate-scheduled from 1900 GMT-is a political tradition in France since 1974, when Socialist Francois Mitterrand took on centrist Valery Giscard d’Estaing. It only failed to take place in 2002 when Chirac said debate was impossible with “intolerance and hatred” after Jean-Marie Le Pen stunned France by making the run-off.

The stakes in the election are high, with Europe watching to see if Macron wins another five years in office to work as a champion of the EU, which Le Pen has vowed to reform under a far-right presidency.

Opinion polls currently put the centrist Macron at 53 to 56 percent in the run-off against 44 to 47 percent for Le Pen-a much tighter finish than five years ago, when Macron carried the vote with 66 percent.

For Le Pen, the debate represents a final chance to haul back ground in the polls and convince France she has moderated her anti-immigration party into a mainstream force. Macron is likely to seek to portray her as a dangerous extremist who cannot be trusted on foreign policy-especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, given her past comments of admiration toward President Vladimir Putin.—AFP

— AFP SAINT-PIE E-EN-AUGE France: French far-right assemblement National N party Member of Parliament and presidential candidate Marine Le Pen C poses for photos with members of the public during a campaign isit to Saint-Pierreen-Auge northwestern France on April .