France on Sunday will vote in the second round of the presidential polls where president Emmanuel Macron will go head-to-head against Marine Le Pen. If Rassemblement National’s Le Pen wins this will be the first time a far-right candidate and a woman will be chosen to lead France. On the other hand, Emmanuel Macron’s win will see for the first time in two decades an incumbent president being reelected.
However, despite opinion polls predicting that Macron will win there are chances that Le Pen could emerge victorious. The opinion polls suggest that it will be a close race with Macron bagging 51% of the votes and his competitor bagging 49% of the votes. The decider among them could be the voters from the far-left and far-right who voted for Jean-Luc Melenchon and Eric Zemmour.
The far-left candidate has urged his supporters to not vote for Marine Le Pen but also refused to push them towards Macron. Analysts speaking to the BBC and the Telegraph fear that it may increase the abstention rate.
Macron chose to appeal to voters who he thinks may not vote in the final round of the polls. He invoked Brexit and Donald Trump’s win in 2016 during an interview.
“There are millions of people who, a few hours before Brexit, decided what was the point in going to vote. Millions did the same in 2016 with Trump. The next day they woke up with a hangover,” Macron told BFMTV.
Meanwhile his opponent Le Pen urged the public to choose between France and Macron. Le Pen, who changed the name of her party to move away from its association with its anti-Islam and anti-immigrant roots from National Front to National Rally, has not gone into controversial topics like immigration and focused on the spiralling cost of living.
But a report from the BBC showed that most voters voted for either far-left or far-right candidates. This is also evident from the 21% of votes amassed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left candidate. Edrisi, a voter in a southern suburb of Paris, told new agency BBC’s Paul Kirby that she will vote blank as it was her national duty to vote.
For some left-leaning candidates Marine Le Pen is better than Macron as they feel that they should choose the lesser evil while choosing between ‘cholera and the plague’. The people on the left are unhappy about Macron’s steps to bring down living costs.
At least 48% of people who voted for Melenchon do not want to vote for Macron. The question now lies if these voters who number up to 7.7 million choose to vote, who they might vote for.
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