The first vote in the election was cast by a 90-year-old man in the tiny island territory of Saint Pierre and Miquelon off the northern coast of Canada.Polls subsequently opened in France’s islands in the Caribbean and the South American territory of French Guiana and voting later starts in territories in the Pacific and then Indian Ocean before it gets underway on the mainland tomorrow.
President Emmanuel Macron is the favourite in France’s presidential runoff tomorrow – but has urged voters to head to the polls to avoid a Brexit-style shock.
A victory over far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the election battle would make Macron the first French president in 20 years to win a second term.
All opinion polls in recent days converge toward a victory for the 44-year-old pro-European centrist – yet the margin over his nationalist rival appears uncertain, varying from 6 to 15 percentage points, depending on the poll.
Polls also forecast the potential of a record-high number of people who either vote blank or stay at home and don’t vote at all in this second and final round.
And, speaking in Figeac, an idyllic medieval village in south-west France, Macron warned that ‘nothing is decided’.
Describing a potential win for Le Pen as a victory for ‘hatred’ and invitation to economic ruin, he also said: ‘Think about what British citizens were saying a few hours before Brexit or (people) in the United States before Trump’s election happened: ‘I’m not going out to vote, what’s the point?’ The next day, they woke up with a hangover.’
‘So if you want to avoid the unthinkable…choose for yourself.’
In her final campaign stop in Pas-de-Calais, her heartland, Ms Le Pen also called for supporters to turn out. She said: ‘Polls aren’t what decide an election.’
Analysts have also reported that Le Pen could upset the polls amid low voter turnout.
‘It could be bigger than Brexit,’ said Michael Hewson, of UK traders CMC Markets.’
Also referring to the surprise election of Donald Trump as president of the USA in 2016, Mr Hewson added: ‘It could be bigger than Trump, if Le Pen prevails.’
Strategists at Citi, the U.S. investment bank, suggested tactical voting combined with low turnout could yet mean victory for the far-Right French candidate.
‘Uncertainty stems from the risk of low voter turnout, as leftist voters refuse to give their vote to Macron, even at the risk of handing over to Le Pen,’ reads a research document.
‘Voter turnout is a factor that pollsters find particularly hard to forecast accurately.’
The April 10 first-round vote eliminated 10 other presidential candidates and the victor between Macron and Le Pen will largely depend on what people who backed those losing candidates do on Sunday.
It is complicated to predict what will happen, especially with leftist voters who dislike Macron but don’t want to see Le Pen in power either.
A second term for Macron relies in part on their mobilization, prompting the French leader to issue multiple appeals to leftist voters in recent days.
The two rivals both appeared combative in the final days before Sunday’s election, including clashing Wednesday in a one-on-one televised debate.
Macron argued that the loan Le Pen’s party received in 2014 from a Czech-Russian bank made her unsuitable to deal with Moscow amid its invasion of Ukraine.
He also said her plans to ban Muslim women in France from wearing headscarves in public would trigger ‘civil war’ in the country that has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe.
‘When someone explains to you that Islam equals Islamism equals terrorism equals a problem, that is clearly called the far-right,’ Macron declared Friday on France Inter radio.
Le Pen slumped in the polls after vowing to ban the Muslim headscarf and after Macron’s civil war warning.
During the debate, Le Pen confirmed that she stood by her controversial idea of banning the headscarf, which she called ‘a uniform imposed by Islamists’, but she said she was not ‘fighting against Islam.’
‘I’m telling it in a very clear manner: I think the headscarf is a uniform imposed by Islamists,’ Le Pen said.
‘I think a great proportion of young women who are wearing it have no other choice in reality.’
Survey results published hours after the face-off showed Macron on 59 per cent of the vote, and his right-wing right rival on 39 per cent, with 2 per cent abstentions.
A similar result on Sunday in the final round of the 2022 presidential election would see Macron win his second five-year term of office, and suggests a widening in the polls from yesterday when the pair were eight to 12 points apart.
The sitting President has said he would not ban religious clothing, but he has overseen the closure of numerous mosques, schools and Islamic groups, with help from a special team to root out suspected breeding grounds for radicalism.
The Macron government also passed a controversial law last year to fight ‘separatism,’ the word used to describe the mixing of politics with Islam, deemed dangerous to France’s prized value of secularism.
But Le Pen has pledged to take things a step further by placing an outright ban on religious clothing in public – a law she says would be enforced like ‘wearing a seatbelt in a car’.
In his victory speech in 2017, Macron had promised to ‘do everything’ during his five-year term so that the French ‘have no longer any reason to vote for the extremes.
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