Emmanuel Macron will announce his candidacy for the French presidential election in a “Letter to the French” which will be posted online Thursday evening, AFP learned from his campaign team, which confirms information from several French media.
Mobilized by the war in Ukraine, the French president will have waited until the last moment to formalize his candidacy for a second term, which candidates must submit before Friday at 6 p.m.
At 38 days from the first round, Emmanuel Macron will thus officially become president-candidate and will be able to kick off a campaign disrupted by the war and which will be one of the shortest ever carried out by an outgoing president.
The invasion of Ukraine, he himself admitted on Wednesday evening in a speech on this crisis, “comes to strike our democratic life and the electoral campaign”.
He nevertheless assured that “this campaign will allow an important democratic debate for the nation” and “will not prevent us from meeting on the essentials”.
This war also has an impact on the polls, which show that it favors the current president, as is often the case in times of crisis.
Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine eight days ago, the president has gained several points in the voting intentions. The polls now give him 27-28%, ten points ahead of his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National, far right), who is widening the gap with Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains, right) and Eric Zemmour (Reconquest!, extreme right).
Thursday morning, Emmanuel Macron spoke for an hour and a half with Vladimir Putin, far from the campaign trips on the ground that his party had planned before the crisis.