Priority to debate. The two finalists in the French presidential election devote themselves on Tuesday to preparing for their televised duel the next day, an appointment that Marine Le Pen had completely missed five years ago against an Emmanuel Macron who will this time have a balance sheet to defend.
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“For me, a failure is sometimes a kick in the butt,” confided on TF1 the far-right candidate, who claims to have learned the lessons of the debate between the two rounds of 2017, where she had arrived ill-prepared and tired after numerous trips.
Five years later, no event is on his agenda on Tuesday. She indicated that she was going to prepare at home, in her office, this obligatory passage of the presidential election since 1974.
Five days before the second round, the candidate of the National Rally (RN), who has focused her campaign on the issue of purchasing power, says she is “extremely serene”.
Compared to 2017, when Emmanuel Macron won by a wide margin (66% to 34%), the context has changed: the polls predict a tighter result, even if the outgoing president is given the winner within a range of 53 to 55, 5%.
And the president-candidate will have to defend his record against the attacks of his rival who denounces his share “a form of deep contempt for the French”.
“Critical debate”
The duel on Wednesday at 9 p.m. is all the more expected since the outgoing president did not participate in any debate before the first round.
The RN accused him of “fleeing” the discussion, which Emmanuel Macron rejects, recalling that none of his predecessors in office had taken part in the exercise.
Discreet before the first round, he himself changed gear after his qualification on April 10, chaining trips, walkabouts and interviews for a week. Mr. Macron obtained 27.85% of the vote in the first round on April 10, against 23.15% for his rival.
If he seems to want to play down the event, Emmanuel Macron will continue on Tuesday to carefully prepare a debate that he says he takes “very seriously”.
Several of his supporters sounded the alarm against those who would be tempted to shun the polls on Sunday, believing that the betting was already done. Even if the opinion polls are favorable to him, Mr. Macron is not immune to a misstep and a mobilization of anti-macronists around Marine Le Pen.
The president-candidate repeated it himself Monday evening on France 5: “Think of what British citizens were saying a few hours before Brexit or in the United States before the Trump vote arrived: I’m not going there. come on, what’s the point? I can tell you that the next day they regretted it, ”he said. “So if you want to avoid the unthinkable or something that puts you off, choose for yourself.”
“Nothing is decided and it should above all not be drawn” from the polls “the idea that the election is folded, that the match is folded. He is not,” warned his Prime Minister, Jean Castex, on Monday, indicating that he would resign, as well as his government, “in the days following” a possible re-election of Emmanuel Macron.
Claude Chirac, the daughter of former President Jacques Chirac, and her husband Frédéric Salat-Baroux, former secretary general of the Élysée, called on Tuesday for “not a voice to be missing from Emmanuel Macron” against Marine Le pen.
blow for blow
During the campaign, the two opponents have so far faced each other from a distance, going blow for blow.
On Monday, the RN candidate once again attacked the president-candidate who “chosen a form of brutality, excess, which was not useful”. “But it actually hides the emptiness of his project,” she said.
The outgoing president replied that “not much has changed” since “the sad anniversary of April 21, 2002” and the qualification of Jean-Marie Le Pen – father of Marine Le Pen and far-right candidate – for the second round . “It’s a family, a clan which, for eight presidential elections, defends the same ideas”.
In this last straight line, the two candidates are trying to seduce the supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon (radical left), who came third in the first round with nearly 22% of the vote, and who called not to grant “a single voice” on the far right.
He must speak on Tuesday at the end of the afternoon, after the consultation carried out with his supporters for the second round, where the blank or null vote came first with 37.65% ahead of the Macron vote (33, 4%) and abstention (29%), support for Mrs. Le Pen not having been proposed.