They seek to convince the undecided and those who opted for other candidates in the first round to vote for them on Sunday, April 24.
Outgoing President Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen prepare with their respective campaign teams for the presidential debate. The two adversaries face each other on Wednesday in a television face-to-face that could be decisive in tipping the balance to one side or the other, four days before the verdict of the polls is known.
Macron, who is running for re-election after five years in the Elysée Palace, and Le Pen, for the third time a candidate for presidential elections, hope to expand their electorate. To do this, they seek to convince the undecided and those who opted for other candidates in the first round to vote for them on Sunday, April 24.
“I have a project that deserves to be known and I believe that the extreme right has a project that must be clarified,” explained Macron, who starts as the favorite in the polls: 53.5% of voting intentions compared to 46.5% of the far right. The centrist candidate hopes that the debate will help the French realize the “inconsistencies” of Marine Le Pen and her electoral program.
The National Regrouping candidate wants the debate to have “a confrontation of ideas.” “I hope it is not a succession of invectives, ‘fake news’ and exaggerations,” Le Pen said on Sunday.
The two candidates already faced each other in 2017 in a television debate that Macron won on the street due to the disastrous performance of the far-right. Le Pen, who arrived at the debate exhausted after an intense electoral campaign, seemed unprepared in the face of a fit Macron who controlled the dossiers well. She now hopes to get her revenge.
Le Pen will try tomorrow to put the outgoing president on the ropes, whom he accuses of having divided the French. The far-right wants to present herself to the French as the “candidate of purchasing power” against the “president of the rich” and as “the candidate of the people against” “the caste.”
Macron, for his part, will try to demonstrate that, despite the whitewashing of the candidate’s image and the change of the name of his party, National Regrouping continues to be a far-right party, just like the National Front, the party he founded Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of the candidate.
Marine Le Pen has a lot to gain from this debate. It is difficult for him to do worse than in 2017. Macron must be careful not to appear too aggressive against his opponent and avoid releasing any “macronada”, a controversial phrase that makes him seem arrogant and that goes viral on social networks, such as the that he has released from time to time and that has persecuted him during his presidency.
The first television debate in France between face-to-face candidates was in 1974 between the Socialist François Mitterrand and the Conservative Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Since then, the candidates for the Elysée have undergone this exercise, with the exception of the conservative Jacques Chirac, who in 2002 refused to debate Le Pen Sr.
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