What do you expect from the French presidential elections on Sunday?

The France Next Sunday (10) the first round of presidential elections in the country. The country’s current president, Emmanuel Macron, is running for a second term and is leading in the opinion polls, but is closely followed by centre-right candidate Marine Le Pen.

According to Facamp (Colleges of Campinas) Professor of International Relations James Onig, both Macron and Le Pen dislike an important part of the French electorate, but nevertheless, they will walk calmly in the second round.

“What we are witnessing in France today is a polarization between Macron, who is a centrist, and Le Pen, who is a right-wing candidate, but she is no longer that angry right-wing, she has made a change in her political marketing,” he explains. R7.

Le Pen was previously seen as a far-right candidate, largely due to the history of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who came to the defense of racist and xenophobic ideas, leading her daughter to flee this kind of talk.

According to Le Parisien newspaper, Macron leads polls of voting intentions with 27% of French voters. Then comes Le Pen with 22%. The two are technically related, as the survey’s margin of error increases or decreases 2.6%.

Candidates are running out

Also according to Le Parisien, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is in third place with 17% of the vote, technically tied with Le Pen. The candidate represents the weak and fragmented French left over the years.

“Mélenchon is a leftist trying to mobilize socialists, whom I fear have not been able to get governments in France for a long time, and who need to set a more realistic agenda in recent months in order to win the votes of those who were not satisfied with Macron’s government, which ended up being Hurting a lot of people, especially workers,” says Onig.

In fourth place in the polls is Eric Zemmour, the candidate of the Reconquête party. The college professor classified Zemmour as contradictory because of Algerian origin against immigrants.

Eric Zemmour is a candidate with far-right xenophobic views. He has a strange paradox to understand: he is a Jew of Algerian origin, but speaks against immigrants, especially Muslims. This ended up sparking a lot of discussion in France. It attracts a very conservative audience.”

Republicans’ Valerie Pecres closes the list of five candidates cited by Le Parisien voters. The survey included 1963 people aged 18 and over.

Macron and the war in Ukraine

The French president has positioned himself as one of the major world powers trying to reconcile the political struggle Russia and Ukrainebefore tensions escalate between the two countries into a war.

After the Russian invasion, Macron continued his talks with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky to reach a ceasefire agreement between the two parties. Professor Facamp believes that the move by the Frenchman made him more popular, which could garner votes in Sunday’s election.

Macron presented himself as a calm, anxious, and proactive interlocutor of the whole crisis that was unfolding. It seems to me that he will replace Merkel, who was Putin’s privileged interlocutor. That made his campaign great, so I think it can be reversed in some voices,” concludes Onig.

In addition to the president, France will also choose deputies and senators. In the event of a second round, the French people will return to the polls in two weeks, on April 24.