After a bruising campaign overshadowed by scandals and the fear of terrorism, France will choose a new president on Sunday with the centrist former banker Emmanuel Macron the clear favourite to defeat the far-right Marine Le Pen.
Voting will take place under strict security similar to the operation mounted for the first round of voting on April 23, when more than 50,000 police officers, gendarmes and soldiers guarded 66,000 polling stations.
As a mark of France’s constant state of alert, police have arrested several people suspected of planning terrorist acts in recent weeks. A state of emergency declared after the Paris massacre in which 130 people were killed on November 13, 2015 has been repeatedly extended and remains in place.
Mr Macron, 39, will become the youngest president in French history if the final pre-election opinion polls, crediting him with 62 per cent of voting intentions, prove to be accurate.
His election would be greeted with broad relief by France’s Muslim population, Europe’s largest and variously estimated at between four million and seven million. Experts differ on whether there is truly a “Muslim vote” but agree that the overwhelming majority strongly disapprove of Ms Le Pen, 48, who is associated with anti-Islam, anti-immigration policies.
On Wednesday night, Mr Macron’s position was reinforced by first reactions to a tense and bad-tempered television debate, in which the candidates repeatedly clashed and traded insults.
More than 16 million viewers – fewer than for equivalent broadcasts towards the climaxes of the 2007 and 2012 presidential campaigns – watched the two-and-a-half-hour debate.
An immediate poll conducted for BMFTV by Elabe found 63 per cent considered Mr Macron the more convincing of the two.
On Thursday, Mr Macron lodged a formal complaint over claims that he had a secret offshore account in the Bahamas. As prosecutors opened an inquiry, Mr Macron said some of the bogus reports originated from sites linked to Russian interests. The Kremlin has denied interfering in the French and US elections.
When Ms Le Pen raised the matter in the debate, he described the suggestion as slander. Ms Le Pen tried to downplay the row, claiming she was entitled to ask a question, but the incident highlighted the way “fake news”, much of it aimed at denigrating Mr Macron, has persisted throughout the campaign.
Ms Le Pen’s hopes of victory appear to rest on a late surge of support from people who are considering voting blank – attending polling stations but only to submit empty envelopes or unmarked papers – or abstaining altogether.
In the debate, Mr Macron labelled his opponent the “high priestess of fear” and accused her of maintaining a family tradition based on hatred and divisiveness, dating from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s creation of their Front National party in 1972.
“You have shown you are not the candidate of a spirit of finesse, with a desire for balanced and open democratic debate,” he told her. She was the true inheritor of an extreme right-wing party that prospered on the anger of the French and embraced “a spirit of defeat”.
He said she had lied to the electorate, had nothing of value to offer France and was unworthy of the office of president.
For her part, Ms Le Pen, said Mr Macron was weak on terrorism and “Islamist fundamentalism”. She taunted him as a the “pampered offspring of an elitist system”, a failure as economy minister in Francois Hollande’s socialist government and a champion of “wild globalisation”.
Mr Macron has never been elected to office but served Mr Hollande for four years, as an adviser and then minister, before resigning a year ago to build his movement, En Marche (Forward).
Accusing him of being a lapdog of Angela Merkel, chancellor of the EU’s leading economic power, Germany, Ms Le Pen said the election would leave France ruled by a woman – either her, as the country’s first female president, or Mrs Merkel.
Ms Le Pen promises a referendum on French withdrawal from the EU and also wants to restore the French franc in place of the euro.
She trailed Mr Macron by nearly three points in the first round. Mr Macron took 24.01 per cent of the vote and the conventional centre-right candidate Francois Fillon was pushed into third place on 20.01, just ahead of the far-left Jean-Luc Melenchon on 19.58. With the formal socialist party candidate, Benoit Hamon, reduced to fringe status with under 7 per cent, the result produced the first run-off in modern French history with neither of the traditional big parties involved.
While Mr Fillon urged members of his party, Les Republicains, to vote for Mr Macron in the run-off, Mr Melenchon has refused to go beyond saying he will not vote for Ms Le Pen. A consultation process among supporters of his movement La France Insoumise (France unbowed), suggests two-thirds will vote blank or abstain.
Financial markets reacted with satisfaction to the narrow avoidance of a second-round decider between two extremes, Ms Le Pen and Mr Melenchon. A Macron victory would probably lead to a further boost for business, whereas a surprise win for Ms Le Pen would almost certainly hit share prices and raise fears about the impact of her anti-EU and protectionist policies.
On foreign affairs, Ms Le Pen would be softer on both Russia, seeking an end to EU sanctions over the Ukrainian conflict due for renewal in July, and the Syrian regime of Bashar Al Assad. Relations with the United States could cool, even though Ms Le Pen welcomed the victory of Donald Trump.
Mr Macron supports international intervention against Mr Al Assad and strongly opposes Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on a range of issues. He said in the final stages of campaigning that while he would treat Mr Putin “as a working partner on some regional problems”, such discussions would take place “in the knowledge that on many subjects, we do not share the same values”.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae