Macron, Le Pen face off in high stakes election debate

PARIS (Reuters) -French President Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Marine Le Pen will face off on Wednesday evening in a debate that could be decisive in Sunday’s presidential election.

For Le Pen, who lags Macron in voter surveys, it is a chance to show she has the stature to be president and persuade voters they should not fear seeing the far-right in power.

“Fear is the only argument that the current president has to try and stay in power at all cost,” Le Pen said in a campaign clip, accusing Macron of doom-mongering over what a far-right presidency would mean for France.

It is the second time the two rivals have met in a head-to-head debate before a run-off vote. Five years ago, Le Pen’s presidential challenge unravelled during their encounter as she mixed up her notes and lost her footing.

The prime-time televised event on that occasion cemented Macron’s status as the clear front-runner.

Much has changed, however. Macron is no longer the disruptor from outside politics and now has a track record that Le Pen can attack. Meanwhile, she has tacked towards mainstream voters and worked hard at softening her image.

“The French now see her as a possible president, unlike in 2017. It’s now up to us to prove she would be a bad president,” a source close to Macron said.

Financial markets are more sanguine about the election than they were five years ago, even though political risks are higher now no matter who wins.

The odds offered by British political bookmakers on Wednesday pointed to a 90% chance of a Macron victory.

Nonetheless, Emmanuel Cau, head of European equity strategy at Barclays, warned against complacency among investors.

“A late shift cannot be discounted given the high number of undecided voters,” he wrote in a note.

DUEL

The election presents voters with two opposing visions of France: Macron offers a pro-European, liberal platform, while Le Pen’s nationalist manifesto is founded on deep euroscepticism.

After more than half of the electorate voted for far-right or hard left candidates in the first round, Macron’s lead in opinion polls is narrower than five years ago.

Moreover, Le Pen can only do better than in the 2017 debate, which she herself called a failure, while it could be hard for Macron to repeat such a knock-out performance.

But Macron is not without assets for this debate.

With far-right pundit Eric Zemmour now out of the game, Le Pen lost a rival who made her look less radical, by comparison, and that has hit her in opinion polls.

Unemployment is at a 13-year low and the French economy has outperformed other big European countries – even if inflation is biting into that.

And while she has largely managed so far to brush it aside, Le Pen has her past admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin working against her.

Bringing the issue back to the fore, jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny urged French voters to back Macron because of Le Pen’s ties with Moscow. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy meanwhile told BFM TV that he would not want to lose the rapport he had built with Macron.

One voter survey on Tuesday projected a Macron win with 56.5% of the vote.

The run-off debate offers Le Pen an opportunity to regain the initiative with only four days left to voting. Such debates have in post-war France typically been widely-watched and past memorable catchphrases are still quoted decades later.

“I’m keen to see what happens,” voter Joseph Lombard said in Paris. “It’s always a boxing match.”