Laïcité, extrémité, fragilité: our French-election series in full

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Hello, and welcome to a special Saturday episode of the Intelligence. Sometimes it's not just weekdays that we provide fresh perspectives. The first round of France's presidential election is tomorrow, and our first ever series has been examining the race since early February. This show is a roundup of those six pieces all in one place, looking at the candidates, their platforms and the sharply shifting political landscape in France. We started two months ago on February 3rd by unveiling our election forecast model and visiting a place that shed light on France's center right. French voters haven't re elected an incumbent president since the victory of Jacques Chirac two decades ago.

Restons en est font dans la liberte.

We've got reason to suspect that that pattern will be broken in April's election. According to our freshly released election forecast model, President Emmanuel Macron, who's expected to throw his hat in the ring any day now, is likely to prevail. That outcome, though, won't be decided in Parisian salons or rural vineyards.

Saint Bris Sous Foret is a very average sort of suburb that you find on the fringes of greater Paris. It's really the edge of the city where the capital, the sort of built up capital, bleeds into the fields.

Sophie Petter is our Paris bureau chief.

If you walk around, which I did, you see sort of Curved streets with small houses, each with a little garage and a parking space, and A1 Main street with a boulangerie, a baker and a cheesy pizza restaurant and a cafe. And then on the out of town, you have these big hypermarkets where people have to drive and do their shopping to get back to their suburban house.

Okay, that all sounds pleasant enough and not much like the site of an election battleground, but why did you decide to go there and not Paris or even Marseille, beyond the cheesy pizza?

Well, I think that it's a mistake sometimes to think of France as either being the city center with the sort of elegant boulevards, or rural France with its, you know, lavender fields and vineyards. You know, most of the French actually live in these kind of in between suburban, edge of city places. And that's where I think, you know, you need to go in order to try and understand this election. And St. Bris souffore in particular was an interesting example because it's in a region that is run by the main center right candidate, Valerie Picres, but the mayor belongs to Emmanuel Macron, the President's party. So if you think of those two candidates as the sort of two main or leading mainstream candidates at this election, it's a really interesting place to test how they fare and what people think of them in a way that might exemplify France as a whole. In other words, locals in St Brice might well be torn between voting for the President, Emmanuel Macron, or his centre right rival, Valerie Picres.

If you're a regular listener, you'll know that this is just the kind of electoral scenario that our data journalists love to dig into. They've built statistical models in the run up to elections in Germany, in America, even in France back in 2017 in. And so far they've been pretty accurate. They're at it again.

Well, our election model for the French election this April is similar to our previous election models because the model is based on polls.

Our lead polling guru, Eliot Morris, has been deep in the numbers for the forecasting tool the Economist unveiled yesterday.

Indeed, the French model is based exclusively on polls. We don't use any other information. And that's really a historical choice. We couldn't find anything else that's as reliable a predictor as, as the polls.

And what sort of polls are we talking about here?

We have polls in France going back to 1965, so we can quantify how accurate they've been on any day of historical campaigns. So, for example, 200 days before the election the polls are on average about five percentage points off, and on election day, they're about two and a half percentage points off. So there's a rough increase in precision as we get closer to the election day. But the French election model this year is different because there's a two round system, not like you have in the US or in Britain, where you have to simulate first which candidates are going to make it to the runoff round, that are going to place in first and second place in the first round, and then sort of chain the simulations together, then see what's going to happen in the second round, repeating this entire process. So instead of having tens or hundreds of thousands of simulations, like we would do for the US we actually have 10 million for the French cycle, which is sort of a fun number. It doesn't mean much statistically, but 10 million is a huge number.

Okay, and what have the 10 million simulations revealed so far?

Yeah, so in these 10 million faux elections of sorts, as it stands today, we have Emmanuel macron winning about 7.9 million of them. So a win probability roughly of like 79% now. So that means there's a 1 in 5 chance that he's not going to win. According to this model, the second likeliest candidate is Valerie Pacres, the center right, a Republican candidate. We give her around a 1 in 10 chance, slightly higher than the chance we would give for Marine Le Pen, the farther right candidate, who of course was in the runoff in 2017. With Macron.

And any caveats here? How confident are you in the forecast so far?

Well, the forecasting model is essentially as good as the polls that go into it. We can't have more accurate predictions of vote share for candidates than essentially what people tell us. That's the truth in France and in other countries. So a lot could still happen in that 1 in 5 chance. We are far away from April. We know, for example, that Macron's support in the polls hastened the fall. Support for Crest has increased. And there's a sort of wildcard factor too, with Eric Zamore, the farther right candidate, who's just sort of invented his own party to run for president. That hasn't happened all that often in French presidential history.

But inventing a party is exactly what incumbent President Emmanuel Macron did back in 2016. And it's a safe bet he'll soon be in the running for the election this April. Our model suggests that the battle to come will be fought on the right, that Valerie Pecress, Marine Le Pen and Eric Zamour will be jockeying for a place in a run off against Mr. Macron in the second round. How that would go will depend on how voters reckon he's handled things the first time around.

Some people are unhappy with Emmanuel Macron's performance. I went out in St. Brist to a roundabout on the edge of town where there's a giant hypermarket, and I found there Agnes, Jose lhort and Eveline, they were standing there in the cold with their hoods up. It was a drizzly day. And next to them there was this yellow painted concrete block where they had painted the Gillet Jaunes from Saint Brice. We won't give up. This was the uprising that emerged across France in 2018, not long after Macron.

Was elected, against a rise in motor.

Fuel tax at the time. Their current gripe is a new national rule which was introduced in January, and it makes vaccination compulsory. Among these three women that I spoke to, only one of them said that she was vaccinated herself. But I think above all, they seem to be indignant at the way that Macron has, in their view, favored the rich and displayed a form of contempt towards ordinary people. But when I sat down with him in his office in the town hall, the mayor of Saint Brice, Nicolas Leloux, was, was much more hopeful. He told me that he thinks Macron is more popular than it seems and that there's a silent majority that back him and that they shouldn't be ignored. He also said that the people he's spoken to in the town think that.

Macron has handled the pandemic well.

And do you think it's as simple as that? That for the presidential election, there are essentially two extreme views, satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

One of the things that struck me is that people weren't talking about the presidential election at all. They're much more concerned about daily issues, COVID testing in schools, which has caused quite a lot of chaos. Some worried about the rising energy prices, heating bills, others about petty crime. But if thinking ahead to the election, it seems that the candidates have to address what people really are interested in. And it's those daily concerns, you know, that's what people are going to be voting on when it comes to the election in April.

And in the end, what I saw in a place like Saint Brice may well determine who governs France for the next five years.

So it sounds as if we should keep a close eye then on St. Louis.

Absolutely.

Sophie, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason. Always a pleasure. Thank you.

Two weeks later, on February 17, we examined the failings and the fragmentation of France's left wing parties. The French are well known for their revolutionary spirit, their workers unions, their many, many protests. The country's relationship with socialist and communist ideas has deep roots. The Socialist Party has provided two Francois Mitterrand. And Francois Hollande.

Irrepressible, ma'.

Am. It's been the source of landmark social legislation, including the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 and the legalization of gay marriage in 2013.

Two men have become the first gay couple to legally marry in France, just days after President Francois Hollande signed the same sex marriage bill into law.

But in the intervening years, the left has been left behind by voters. In the second installment of our series, we're asking how that will play out in France's coming presidential election.

The left is in a dismal state. There is no candidate on the left in France for this election that looks like coming anywhere close to qualifying for the second round.

Sophie Petter is our Paris bureau chief.

There are too many of them and not a single one is managing to impose him or herself as a forceful presence to attract the votes on the left.

Who are the candidates on the left? There being too many of them?

Well, the Socialist Party's candidate is Anne Hidalgo, who's fairly well known abroad because she's the mayor of Paris, But she's doing pretty dismally in the polls. There's the Green Party candidate, that's Yannick.

Jadot, redondant la France de l'. Espoirnde, Romain notre d', estain, c' est.

Pussimme, who ran in 2017 at the last election, but stood down in the end in favor of the Socialist candidate. But this time he looks like he's going to go all the way and he also is doing pretty dismally. The candidate who has emerged most recently is Christian Tobiran, Who is an old timer, former Justice Minister and who emerged in the race with really at the last moment. And then there are a clutch of other candidates on the hard left. Among them Jean Luc Melanchon, Who is a 70 year old firebrand on his third presidential election campaign. And he is in a way the one that's best placed at the moment. But that's not saying much.

So you say essentially each of those candidates is doing abysmally in the polls. Why do you suppose that is?

I think that the French left has become disconnected from the blue collar working class vote. That was what Francois Mitterrand did so cleverly when he managed to blend sort of the Urban public sector vote with the working class vote. But these days, that vote now goes to Marine Le Pen. She is thought of as being on the far right, but she actually scoops up a lot of the blue collar vote. 33% of blue collar workers back up for president, but only 3% of them back. And Hidalgo, the Socialist candidates. And I think that this disconnection is really what explains the failure of the candidates on the left to secure enough support.

With that much evidence, support for Maureen Le Pen, a fairly hard right figure, it sort of suggests that the median voter has kind of marched to the right.

I think that's right. If you look today at polls, you find that 37% of voters say they're on the right now, and that's 4 points higher than it was in 2020. And only 20% of them say they're on the left. So we have seen a shift in the structure of French politics. Some people blame Emmanuel Macron for that because he created this big centrist party and stole from both the left and the right. And in a way, it sort of realigned French politics. And that has crushed a lot of the former Socialist Party. And I think what we've seen at the same time is the emergence of identity politics in France in a very strong way. We've got two candidates here on the far right who are trying to frame the debate around immigration and Islam. And that has also contributed, I think, to building a campaign that is really about the right and not this year about the left.

And it is kind of becoming crunch time ahead of the French election. Do you think there's any hope that the Left could be revived, that these poll numbers might rise?

Well, there was an effort to try and save the left when a citizens group organized a people's primary. The point of this people's primary, of course, was to try and ensure that only one candidate would emerge and the others would then drop out. 400,000 people actually took part in this, and the person that they designated was Christian Tuberin. But because this was not an informal process that was agreed on by the candidates, none of them actually then stood down.

But is this fragmentation the left's biggest problem, really? It seems like there are bigger forces at work.

Well, it's going to stop them getting into the second round. But I think there's a bigger problem, and that is that all this squabbling among candidates and attempts to try and find a way forward has eclipsed any serious proper debate about what the left stands for. Now, there are plenty of issues that are A problem in France, whether it's about integrating minorities or curbing inequality, or even recent issues like how to protect the poor from the burdens of the green transition at a time when public spending has reached an exceptional level because of the pandemic. So these are big questions for Social Democrats across Europe and certainly in France, but they're not the ones that are being grappled with at the moment by the French left. So I think if the left has a future in France, its candidates are doing a very good job of disguising it.

Thanks very much for joining us, Sophie.

Thank you, Jason.

On March 3rd, we looked at the Republican candidate, Valerie Pecress, who had until that time been the most serious challenger to President Emmanuel Macron. The clock is ticking for would be presidential contenders in France. The election isn't for five weeks, but the deadline for candidates to gather 500 signatures from elected officials and announce a run is tomorrow. Eric Zemaud and Marine Le Pen, the two top far right contenders, have only just passed the threshold. Others will have to drop out. French President Emmanuel Macron has been preoccupied with other matters, such as leading Europe's diplomatic effort to head off war in Ukraine. But there's one candidate who's had all her signatures sorted for weeks. After winning the primary of the Republican Party in December, Valerie Pecress recorded a big bump in the poll. But despite that early strong showing, her campaign has been sputtering. In this third installment of our French election series, we look at what Valerie Pecress's declining fortunes could spell for the race to come.

I followed Valerie Picres as part of her campaign trail, which has taken her all over France. In fact, she's been one of the most diligent campaigners to a town in the Ardennes called Charlot Mezieres, which is a small town in northeastern France.

And there was a lot of hope.

And enthusiasm about her at the rally that I attended.

Sophie Pedder is our Paris bureau chief.

I spoke to one woman who said she really believed that it was time for a woman president and that she was strong enough to take on that role. Another told me that she thought Valerie Pecress seemed quite confident and that she.

Really knew how to listen.

I would say that overall, the people I saw in Charleville Messier were really quite excited at the prospect of electing France's first female president.

So who is Valerie Picres exactly? What's her political background?

Well, Valerie Picres is a very experienced politician. She's been around for decades. She has described herself as two thirds Merkel and 1/3, Thatcher. I think, you know, most people know her as being head of the Greater Paris region, the Ile de France. She was once universities minister under Nicolas Sarkozy. She was also a budget minister. And she, like Emmanuel Macron, was educated at the elite civil service training college, the Ecole Nationale d'. Administration. This means that she is well briefed, she's quite serious in debate. Some people have nicknamed her the bulldozer. And she did very well in the debates in the Republicans primary late last year, which is what I think explains how she won the nomination in the end. And really, up until just a few weeks ago, she looked as if she was the most credible challenger to Emmanuel Macron.

And you say up until a few weeks ago. What's changed in the meantime?

Well, I think there's a structural reason, and that's that fundamentally Varieu Picres doesn't really have a program that is that different to Manuel Macron's. She's instinctively part of the centre right. She was a sort of fairly moderate budget minister when she was in government. She is seen as someone who is fiscally conservative. She's in favor of tax cuts, as has he. And therefore the base that she's appealing to on the centre right is pretty much the base that has already swung behind Macron. And that makes it very difficult. Yet the real problem she's had is that her party, actually its centre of gravity, sits to the right. And this means that she has had to or has chosen to take a pretty tough line on some of questions about immigration, identity politics. She has done more than nod to the party's right wing. And obviously in France, because there are these two very strong candidates on the extreme right, and notably Erich Zamore, but also Marine Le Pen. This means that she has tried to straddle a position that doesn't make sense to a lot of people. It's both moderate in some respects, especially on the economy, but when it comes to values and identity, she comes across as really very right wings.

So why has she taken this hard turn now? Is it just a matter of electoral arithmetic?

I think that's part of the explanation. But in many ways I actually think she has been always a sort of cultural conservative. She voted in the national assembly against the legalization of gay marriage back in 2013, and she even at one point proposed unmarrying gay couples if that law was ever passed. She's since backtracked on that. But I think she has a very much a family values cultural conservative that sits a little oddly with her more liberal economic views. And then I think the point that she has had to concede ground to the party's right has been really quite dramatic. At a rally in Paris quite recently, she even mentions the Great replacement theory. This is the idea that's espoused by Erich Zamore, that France's population is being overwhelmed by immigrants, and in particular, Muslim immigrants. And it's a theory that is actually outside France, espoused by white supremacists. So the fact that she mentioned it in a quite ambiguous phrase was seen as pretty disappointing to some of those on the more moderate end of the center right.

And so that turn in particular is what's led to her downfall in the polls.

I think it's a combination of the poor performance at this rally. She was also very oddly stilted, and it was quite a wooden performance, which surprised some people. And I think that she has just somehow failed to really make her mark on the French mind. The heart of this problem, it's both structural, it's a poor performance, and it's also somehow a failure to persuade the French that she's a serious candidate.

And what does that decline in the polls mean for the race more generally, do you think?

Well, of course, there are still five weeks to go, so I think anyone wouldn't want at this point to rule out there being further sort of shifts in the polls. But I think what we're looking at potentially is the failure of the centre right, a major political family that has dominated French political life under the Fifth Republic, going all the way back to 1958, a failure to put forward a candidate that has a good chance of becoming a president. And this, in a way, is almost a mirror image of what's happened on the French left, which we've talked about before. As a consequence, you have Macron, who holds the sort of this centrist position, and then you have the extremes. And that is what we saw back in 2017, when Emmanuel Macron was first elected. And we are increasingly seeing a repeat of that situation where you have a strong centre and then strong extremes, but the moderate sort of traditionally dominant political parties really struggling to exist. Of course, all of these dynamics may shift again once Emmanuel Macron finally declares officially that he is indeed running for re election.

Sophie, again, thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

By March 17, it was clear that Mr. Macron's campaign and his ability to campaign were being constrained by war in Ukraine. France's President, Emmanuel Macron, has been relentlessly seeking a diplomatic solution with Russia before and since the country invaded Ukraine he's called or met with Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, at least 16 times since last December.

I have to say we constantly engaged in a discussion with President Putin till the very last minute before he launched his war and after decided to launch this war to try to reopen negotiations and get a ceasefire.

Meeting with Ukrainian refugees at a welcome center. This week, he's also announced plans to welcome at least 100,000 of their number. And he's not ruling out a visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, but only if there is what he calls a tangible result. Amidst all of this, you could be forgiven for forgetting that Mr. Macron is also in the middle of a re election campaign. In this fourth installment of our French election series, we look at how the return of war to Europe is influencing voters ahead of the April poll.

This presidential race is turning out to be one of the strangest election campaigns in modern times, certainly the strangest that I've ever covered.

Sophie Petter is our Paris bureau chief.

Emmanuel Macron, who is the sitting president, waited until March 3. That was a day before the deadline, before he announced formally and finally that he's running for re election. In a letter that he published to the French public a few days later, I then went to his first campaign event in Poissy, which is a town in Les Evelines to the west of Paris, and Macron told the crowd that he is running for re election, but in a very unusual, unique geopolitical context. It seemed like he was saying this almost as a way to manage people's expectations of him on the campaign trail and how much time he was going to be able to devote to it, because, as he kept saying, I'm also president and there is a war on.

And how did that land among the people who were at that launch? What were they saying?

Talking to people at the event, some of them highlighted his ability to manage crises very well, and that's something that he tends to be quite good at. One young man told me that he trusted Emmanuel Macron to govern France again because of his track record so far. But other people at that event were not quite that supportive. There was one woman I spoke to who suggested that Macron was using the war as an excuse to look like some kind of savior. It was, in her view, a means of deflecting criticism of his own presidency.

Well, what do you make of that argument? That it is a bit of wartime president electioneering?

Well, I think it's inevitable that Macron is going to be open to that criticism, because he is trying to use Diplomacy and other means to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. At the same time as he's campaigning for the presidency. The two are happening at the same time, and that exposes him to the criticism.

But I think you are actually also.

Looking at someone who, as a politician is at his best in a crisis, and that is what the French are seeing. There are a lot of factors right now that are playing in his favor. The French, I think, are feeling extremely anxious, like many in Europe at the moment. And so the sort of search for stability could play in his favor. It's. It's also meaning that because he's spending so much time on the phone to Putin or trying to talk to other Europeans and other Western allies about ending this war, that he's not spending so much time on the campaign trail. And a lot of the candidates are finding that very frustrating. He said, for example, he won't participate in any debate until the second round.

Until the second round of the election, the April 24th runoff, suggesting he's very confident that on April 10th he's going to sail through the first round.

Well, I mean, he's trying to tell his own campaign team not to sound triumphalist, and he's insisted publicly that everything is still open, everything's still to play for, and that it's a mistake ever to assume that things are won until they are. But if you look at the Economist's electoral forecasting model, we now put at 97% Macron's chances of re election, which is really astonishingly high. So I don't think there is much doubt that he will make it to the second round. The other candidates are not looking as.

Strong at the moment.

How do you mean? How are those other candidates looking?

I think the war has had an impact on all the candidates, not just those on the extreme. There has been a sort of rally around the flag effect. Nearly 80% of the French support welcoming refugees. They're supporting the export of arms to Ukraine. And it means that it's quite a difficult time for a Eurosceptic candidate or for an anti immigration candidate, which both Marine Le Pen and Eric Zamor are. To make that case. I think also that Vladimir Putin's aggression has exposed the contradictions of a number of Macron's opponents, in particular those on both the far left and the far right. If you think about Marine Le Pen, she took a campaign loan from a Russian bank back in 2014. And in one of her campaign brochures, she advertised a photograph of her meeting Putin in the Kremlin which has become an embarrassment. So even if Marine Le Pen and Eric Zamor have made an effort to.

Say that they condemn the war, their.

Past praise for either Russia or Putin has come back to really embarrass them. That goes for Examor as well, because he, up to a point, has been the most praiseworthy of Putin, and at one point said Putin was a true Russian patriot, And at another time, he said that he dreamed of there being a French Putin. And on the far left, Jean Luc Melanchon, too, has been caught out by the fact that he has found it very difficult to condemn much of Russia's aggression over the past few years.

Well, in that sense, it seems like things are kind of going Mr. Macron's way.

Macron knows he can't be complacent. He does still suffer from this image of being a remote president. It's an image that he cultivated himself when he took office, of course. And even if 59% told a poll that they think he's risen to the challenge over Ukraine, only a third say that he is close to people's concerns. And those on the left still judge him to be the president who helped the rich because of the early tax cuts that he made. So there are still criticisms of the sitting president in France, and you continue to hear them, but the opposition is so fragmented, has proved to be so weak, that I think even with this popularity problem, it is increasingly hard now to see how Mr. Macron won't next month, in the end, keep his job.

Sophie, thanks again for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

It's always a pleasure.

On March 31, my taskmasters at last allowed me out of the office, and we hit the ground in France, exploring how the country's large Muslim population figured into a race that was always going to be fought on the right. In Paris on Sunday, tens of thousands of people descended on the Trocadero, just across the Senna river from the Eiffel Tower. They'd come for the biggest campaign rally yet of Eric Zemaurd, a candidate of the extreme right. He'd been a TV pundit, polemicist, who entered the presidential race in late November and swiftly looked like he posed a serious challenge to Marine Le Pen, a stalwart of the country's far right. We'd come to see how Mr. Zimor would whip up supporters with his platform, anti feminist, anti woke, anti foreigner, and perhaps most of all, anti Muslim. By the time Mr. Zamor took the stage, we'd been there for more than two hours. As one party functionary after another gave speeches interspersed with slick campaign videos featuring the parents of children killed by North African migrants or by Islamist terrorism. For some, it's a resonant message. France has been the site of horrific attacks. It's easy for the likes of Mr. Zimour to play to public fears to elide Islam and Islamic terror, but his speech was, well, pretty flat. Academic. He is no firebrand, but the crowd got whipped up all the same. A chant of this is our home starts elsewhere in the crowd and picks up in volume. Then it's get on the plane. Early in the campaign, this kind of stuff got Mr. Zimour lots of attention and support in the polls. But the truth is that apart from this rally, people seem to have cooled on him as the vote on April 10th nears. In this fifth installment of our French election series, we're going to look at why the feelings he's tapped into renormalized in French society, why those will outlast his presidential run. One part of France where you'll find the kinds of tensions that Mr. Zemour is stoking most in evidence is in the region of Provence in the southeast. The cultural mix includes lots of immigrants from North Africa and their descendants, and it's a place that reliably leans to the right in elections like the current one. Our first stop was Marseille, France's second city of 1.6 million people, which is the exception. It's more cosmopolitan and not so long ago was a socialist and communist stronghold. Our cab driver, Laurent, said he wasn't interested in voting, but he seemed very up on politics. He used one phrase that stuck out. The great replacement. It's from a book by a far right writer named Camus. It's become a white supremacist talking point around the world. In France, the idea is of a relentless replacement of so called French people with those from France's former colonies like Algeria, just across the Mediterranean. Mr. Zemur leans hard on this idea. The French constitution explicitly states that the Republic will be laic, a strict form of secularism that's central to France's identity. For Mr. Zemore and Marine Le Pen of the National Rally, the wearing of the hijab and the Muslim prayer times they can spill out onto French streets are an affront to that idea. We had come to Marseille to visit the Mosque El Isla, the biggest mosque in the southern France in one of the city's northern districts that are known for poverty and crime. We arrived when a class full of children were getting their two hours of Saturday lessons and met Murad Hamza, an imam who preaches at the mosque and elsewhere in the region. I asked him about his faith being dragged into the presidential campaign rhetoric. How, how does it feel to. How does it feel to the community that Islamism is so prevalent, so talked about in politics? He told us. These days, Muslims in France are treated like second class citizens, He said. Every aspect of Muslim life is often seen as a sign of extremism. Even wanting to learn Arabic can earn you the label of Islamist. As the call to prayer began, Mr. Hamza began to roll up his sleeves in preparation for his ablutions and we bid him goodbye. Nearer the center of the city is the En Nasser mosque, where we again arrived just in time for prayers. People ran past us, prayer mats tucked under arms and slung over shoulders. No one wanted to be late. The mosque was full, more than full. As we walked around its perimeter, men knelt on mats laid out on the pavement outside. A few minutes later, they all dispersed, hundreds and hundreds of people, firing up scooters or cars or walking away. When we approached a few of the young men who lingered behind, they spoke first about the sitting president. They weren't big fans. A crook, a liar, an actor, it went on. When asked about other presidential contenders, there was no consensus. One said his life would probably remain just as difficult no matter who wins the race. Another expressed his disappointment in the French electorate, saying he didn't understand how so many people would want to vote for Marine Le Pen or. It's a fair point on the full political spectrum. Mr. Zemor and Ms. Le Pen aren't so far apart. We set off for Frejus, a pretty little town to the east, not far from the beach, that consistently votes for Ms. Le Pen's national rally. There we met with Frank Giletti, who's the regional head of the party. Miss Le Pen, like Mr. Zemour, makes frequent reference to French traditions, to customs and mores by which it seems they frequently mean past ones or Christian ones. So I wanted to ask Frank about the party's kind of identity platform. In plain terms, what are the issues about identity that the party cares about?

Oh, we can see that. We can see that some our tradition are not respected. Our way of life sometimes are not respected. Like, you know, there is some swimming pool, there is a planning for women, planning for men. So it doesn't the identity of France that. That's why we said this is not our identity. Islamist wants some people, the only Islamist people, want to change this way of life.

When I press him about Women wearing the hijab. A question that has long divided France versus other religious symbols. He gets frustrated and lapses into French.

It's not the same idea, you know, it's.

I'm sorry, I don't understand why the connotation is not the same, he says. To where the veil is linked to a political agenda, this is key. For those on the hard right, the only kind of Islam is the political kind. Frank wanted to take us on a little tour of Frejus to get a look at the heart of a Le Pen stronghold. He gestured around a pretty square lined with little cafes, the requisite pastry shop, and he pointed out the town hall, the church.

The people who live here want to keep their way of life, their tradition, their way of life, more, maybe more, than in the other place of France, and specifically to this town.

For Frank, Ms. Le Pen and the rest of the country's hard right, it's this postcard vision of France that's being threatened. Reconciling these two parts of French society. On one side, people who are afraid that too much will change. On another, people who are afraid that nothing will. That is going to be a long road. And one of the only things that's clear is that this election has made that road longer. And this week, on April 7th, we met with members of Marine Le Pen's National Rally, learning how a long program of burnishing the party's image was paying dividends. The first round of France's presidential election is three days away, and one poll after another suggests the same thing. Marine Le Pen of the National Rally will give the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, a serious challenge, something the president nodded to at his first and so far only campaign rally on Saturday. The fact that Ms. Le Pen is faring so well is down in part to a long rehabilitation of the party, distanced somewhat from its founder, her father, Jean Marie. In 1972, he co founded what was then called the National Front, a party that was staunchly, viciously, unapologetically far right. National Front leader Jean Marie Le Fen.

Thunders against what he calls the government's.

Incapacity to halt the invasion of France by foreigners who take work from Frenchmen.

And fill the hospitals and prisons.

Nearly 40 years later, in 2011, Marin was elected to lead the party. The idea, then and since, was to soften the party's message, to clean up its image. Her father is now out of the party altogether and since 2018, has its new name. And in this campaign, Ms. Le Pen has been comparatively quiet on immigration. That's Partly because the slate of candidates has its magnet for the extreme right, Arique zemour. So now Ms. Le Pen can claim to be less extreme, to be more focused on the kinds of kitchen table concerns that she says Emmanuel Macron has left unaddressed. In this sixth installment of our French election series, we're going to look at how she has ended up as Mr. Macron's greatest threat and what that means for a storied party that has very much come in from the fringes of the country's politics.

Thanks.

Last week we looked at the role of Islam in the election and went to the little town of Frejus, where Ms. Le Pen launched her campaign last year. We told you how. We spoke with Frank Giletti, who's a party official in the region. We spoke about the role that identity and immigration are playing in the campaign and about the party's far right image.

We are not from left or from right. We are for the French. And also, it is the main idea of this campaign. We are not right, we are not far right, we are not left. Maybe there is good things from the left. And why not we work for the French or the French.

He said the party's stance on immigration was unchanged, but he said Mr. Zamore's campaign focuses exclusively on it. Ms. Le Pen, he said, had a more complete program fixing the failures of the country's centrist parties.

They used to have the power, the centrism, they used to be elected. And people noticed that nothing changed. There is still an appointment, there is still insecurity, there is still immigration. They pay a lot of tax, more and more tax. They feel less free than before, not happy, and they don't believe in this politics. That's why maybe some people want to change and want to try a party who doesn't have responsibility before.

There's another focus that's playing a big role too, courting the youth vote.

How many French people, young French people, live in London? 300,000, maybe more. These people are good, education, have good place, but they prefer to live in London. Why? Because they don't feel free in France. Because there are a lot of taxes, lot of issues. And what she said. These people, plenty of energy, lot of ideas. We need them in France.

The National Rally has been a party in flux for years, but never more so than now. I asked Frank where he saw it all going. Given the big changes over the past 10 years, where do you see the party in five or 10 years more? And he had a simple answer.

In the Elysees.

No, no.

Right.

The Elysee, the presidential palace. That push for the youth vote is working, especially among the rural and the less educated. Of the young people planning on voting, more are behind Ms. Le Pen than back any other candidate. To find out why, we headed west to Brignolles, where we met with Julien Chevet, the local head of Generation Nation, the party's youth wing.

Bonjour, Julien.

Jason, nice to meet you. He and a few colleagues were pasting Marine Le Pen posters on a roadside electricity substation. What? The poster is in two halves. Emmanuel Macron in black and white. Marine Le Pen smiling in full color. The words say Sans Louis avec Marine. Julien explained. Without him. With Marine. He says the past five years have been a struggle. Everything good was made bad, everything bad got worse. So why with Marin and not with the left leaning parties that traditionally court young voters? She's the one who has the logic for us, he says. Her campaign promises to abolish income tax for the under 30s, to cut value added tax on petrol and energy bills, and to lower motorway tolls. Julian says all that will help young people build their futures. It will make me want to work more, to flourish, to build up savings, to buy a house in a region where a car is a necessity. Cutting petrol prices and tolls really resonates with people like Julian. But what about the history, the stigma of the party? These days, young activists have to travel in groups of three because there have been attacks on other poster pasters. Marine isn't the caricature people make her out to be, he tells us. We're not extremists. We just want to unite people. It would seem that the National Rally is succeeding in its latest push to diversify from right wing talking points to claim to be a progressive party of unity. Everywhere we went, we had to press party members about her position on matters such as immigration. All they typically talked about was those pocketbook issues. But open up the party literature and the top three concerns remain the same. Uncontrolled immigration, Islamism and the security that's under threat. Those messages are being laid out a lot more clearly by Jordan Bardela, the 26 year old acting president of the party. We met him at a press conference before a local party meeting in Marseille. Flashy event, it wasn't. Two photographers, two bodyguards, a handful of journalists. He stressed the parts of the party's platform that have seemed less a focus from his Le Pen's campaign efforts. He spoke of needing to regain control. He reiterated the party's promise of priority access to employment and housing for French citizens of a referendum aimed at clamping down hard on immigration. He said there would be a national outright ban on wearing the hijab, which he said is no longer a religious garment, but a tool of conquest. Victory is not an option, it's a necessity, he concluded. Emmanuel Macron will be defeated. That isn't as outlandish a claim as it seemed when we started this series. Our election forecast model now gives Ms. Le Pen a one in five chance of victory. Win or lose, though, with that shift in focus with a rival further out to the extreme right, with the devotion of a fair fraction of the country's youth, Marine Le Pen and the National Rally will emerge from this campaign in a different place in France's politics. That's all for this special Saturday episode of the Intelligence. Our series will continue in two days time with results from the first round of the election. Later, we'll be taking a close look at the strengths, failings and challenges ahead for current President Emmanuel Macron, who's still the favorite to win in the second round. You can find all of our coverage of the poll attheend economist.com france2022 and you might consider taking out a subscription to the Economist. Our cover this week considers why Mr. Macron matters, but also why he's a cautionary tale for centrists everywhere. The series editor is Kim Gitelson and series producer Alize Jean Baptiste, and our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Thanks also to Sam Westrin and Rory Galloway for production help along the way. We'll see you back here with the results on Monday. It.