Ever since Emmanuel Macron was elected French president in 2017, opinion polls have predicted that in next year’s contest he will again meet far-right leader Marine Le Pen in a second-round run-off. But the emergence of an insurgent newcomer has suddenly thrown the race wide open.
Only six months before the April election, another far-right figure — anti-immigration polemicist Eric Zemmour — has repeated a trick performed by Macron in the 2017 contest, coming from nowhere to storm up the opinion polls and eye the Elysée Palace. In little more than a month, he has started to outrank every potential candidate except Macron himself in the polls.
The two are very different. Although Macron campaigned last time as a revolutionary who was “neither right nor left” and who wanted to shake up French politics, he is an establishment figure. A former banker, he graduated from the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration, served as finance minister and has governed from the centre as a liberal internationalist.