Emmanuel Macron, who faces a two-round Presidential election on 10 and 24 April, has a good chance of escaping the tumbril this year. He has been running ahead of the pack with 23-25% of first-round voting intentions for months.

This may appear surprising. It has not, after all, been The Best of Times for Macron. He has had one of the most troubled presidencies of the Fifth Republic. There was the Gilets Jaunes revolt in peripheral and outer suburban France in 2018-9. There was a widespread rebellion against his flagship pension reforms in 2020. The past two years, nearly half his term, have been frozen by the Covid pandemic.

Could the most fickle electorate in the Western world re-elect a president who is detested by millions and who has, partly because of Covid, failed to deliver many of the reforms that he promised in 2017?

Yes, it is possible. Emmanuel Macron remains popular with the well-off and the highly educated, as well as with many young people and with many old people. His approval ratings are the highest of any late-term President since Mitterrand and higher than when the pandemic began.

All the same, the volatility of France’s recent electoral history should not be ignored. Many voters remain undecided. Only just over half are willing to express an opinion to pollsters. And almost one in three has changed their mind in the last three months. A Macron victory may remain the most probable outcome. But there are still three ways he could lose the Élysée…

First scenario: Omicron overwhelms France

France has weathered the pandemic better than many of its neighbours. Its economy has recovered strongly. The French vaccination programme, after a slow start, overtook Britain’s in September. Street protests against the “health pass” flared in August but fizzled out by October.

Macron has taken most of the key anti-Covid decisions himself, alternating between “strike early” and “wait-and-hope”: he has locked down France three times but he has also gambled against scientific advice on a couple of occasions to keep France open or partially open.

Faced with Omicron, he has reverted to “wait-and-hope” mode. France entered the New Year with almost half of its 7,000 acute care beds occupied by Covid patients — well beyond the 3,000 level which had triggered lockdowns in the past. Almost all of these people have been stricken by Delta. Omicron cases are exploding but the impact on severe sickness and mortality is still to be felt.

Nonetheless, France has taken the least draconian anti-Omicron measures of any western European country other than England. New partial lockdowns, curfews, and an extension of the school holidays were all rejected by Macron last week — against scientific and ministerial advice. Like Boris Johnson in Britain, Macron is fearful of the effect on public opinion of a new clampdown. Unlike Johnson, he also has to consider electoral opinion.

In a two-hour television interview in December, Macron made his first big public statement of the campaign while refusing to confirm that he would run. His pitch was revealing: the energetic young revolutionary of 2017 offered himself as a safe-pair-of-hands — a man who had learned much in office and adversity and could now be trusted to do the right thing.

Only ten days after that, Macron took an electoral gamble with the nation’s health. He hopes to harvest the credit for defying scientific advice on Omicron and refusing a curfew or lockdown. Even if the country is forced into a scrambled Omicron lockdown, he might still reap an electoral bonus from being leader of the nation in an emergency.

A presidential election “en plein pandémique”, disrupting campaigning and depressing turnout, is a scenario that Macron’s opponents fear. In the regional elections last summer, every sitting regional president was re-elected.

But all depends on how serious Omicron turns out to be. Even if it is somewhat milder than Delta, the sheer weight of infections could topple an exhausted French hospital system by February or March.

If that happens, Macron would forfeit his right to be considered “a safe pair of hands”. An election in a time of plague might help the President — but it could also destroy him.

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Valérie Pécresse won't save France

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Second scenario: The Left fights back

One of the curiosities of this French election has been the implosion of the Left. Seven Left-wing and green candidates are set to receive 27% of the first-round vote. Yet as recently as 2012, 43.75% voters chose Left and green candidates in the first round of a presidential election. Where have all those people gone?

Some are sulking because they see no attractive candidate, while a further chunk of white, working-class voters has migrated to the far-Right. But a substantial section of the moderate Left vote has also gone to Macron. Their support, however, is far from guaranteed.

In the 2017 election, Macron split the centre-right but he also split the centre-left from which, in theory, he came. At the moment, the small print of the polls suggests that one third of Macron’s “base” once voted centre-left. The rest come from the amorphous “centre” or from the pro-European wing of the centre-right.

One of Macron’s great fears for this year was that a plausible centre-left or green candidate might emerge to reclaim his remaining moderate-left vote. It has not happened — yet.

The Socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is the theoretical heir of Hollande and Mitterrand. She is currently attracting 3% of voters in Round One. The Green candidate, Yannick Jadot, has around 6%. The Macron camp remains mildly anxious all the same.

Efforts are now underway to thin the field of Left and green candidates by persuading some of them to enter an independent, online “popular primary” later this month. The eloquent, much-loved (on the Left) former justice minister, Christiane Taubira, has indicated she will take part. So has Hidalgo. Could the winner gain a primary “bounce” which would reclaim centre-left votes from Macron?

It is doubtful, but not impossible. If Macron is damaged by a new Covid crisis, he might surrender three or four percentage points to a moderately competitive Left-wing candidate. That would bring him to within striking distance of the trio of far right and centre-right candidates currently squabbling on 13-17% of the vote for one of the two tickets into Round Two.

It is impossible to imagine any Left-wing candidate reaching the second round. A more competitive Left-wing candidate could, however, take enough votes from the President to allow two right-wing candidates to squeeze him out of the run-off.

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Third scenario: the power of Pécresse

The French system of two rounds of voting was revived by Charles de Gaulle for a different political age. The intention was to allow a cacophony of choices which would be edited by the voters into a Right-Left, two-candidate final choice. But since the rise of the far-Right and the weakening of the traditional political families of centre-left and centre-right, the two-round system has become a lottery.

In the first round in 2017, Macron came top with 8.65 million votes. The following three candidates were almost neck and neck, with between 7.05 and 7.6 million votes. For the first time, neither of the traditional “governing families” of centre-right or centre-left reached the second round.

Something similar could happen in April. The opinion polls give Macron the same first round support that he had five years ago. Three other candidates are chasing the second spot and the golden ticket into Round Two.

The great difference this time is that two of those candidates are from the far-Right: Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour. The remaining candidate is from the traditional or “Republican” Right: Valérie Pécresse.

Zemmour, after a lightning rise to 18-19% in September’s polls, has slumped to 12-13%. Le Pen, who was neck and neck with Macron before the summer, stumbled and has now recovered a little to around 16%. Meanwhile, Valérie Pécresse zoomed from nowhere to 19-20% after winning the centre-right primary last month. She has now settled back to 16-17%, just ahead of Le Pen.

It is possible — even likely — that this trio will dispute the second place in the run-off round until the first voting day on 10 April. The prize may, once again, be decided by a few thousand votes.

It is also possible that Zemmour will run out of steam. Suggestions in the British media that the essayist and TV pundit could win the presidency were always far-fetched. Zemmour’s negative ratings were higher than Le Pen’s when he started campaigning unofficially in August. They have grown by 8 percentage points since then to -65%.

If the Zemmour vote melts down, it will split fairly evenly between Le Pen and Pécresse — with perhaps slightly more going to Le Pen. The outcome of that three-way battle is crucial for Macron. The opinion polls suggest that Macron would crush Zemmour if they were to confront one another on 24 April, while he would also defeat Le Pen fairly easily — but closer to 55-45% than his 66-34% landslide of 2017.

A Macron-Pécresse second round, however, would be a toss-up. Many, though not all, Left-wing voters have developed (and almost cherish) a visceral hatred for the President. Nor do they have much time for Pécresse. But they would still vote for her in the run-off to evict Macron from the Elysée.

The most recent opinion polls show Macron winning such a battle — but only just and within the margin of error. In such a scenario, a Pécresse victory cannot be ruled out.

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Macron’s advisors claim that Pécresse will turn out to be a poor campaigner and that they still expect to face Le Pen in the second round. But this will depend on two unknowns: the progress of Omicron and the manoeuvres and gesticulations of what remains of the French Left.

Here, all the same, is a confident prediction: if Macron is defeated, it will be by Valérie Pécresse. She will either snatch “his” place in the run-off (unlikely) or she will narrowly defeat him there (possible).

For one thing is clear: if the next President is not Macron, she will be a woman — and it won’t be Le Pen.

Macron was the centrist modernist who was going to lead a tradition-shackled nation into a brave, new de-regulated future. His embrace of opposing ideologies, akin to Tony Blair’s “triangulation”, even had its own fond nickname: l’en-même-temps-ism, “both-sides-at-the-same-time-ism”.

It has all gone wrong. These days Macron cannot put an expensively-shoed foot right. Always, he steps in the merde. The laws on retirement reform and unemployment assistance? Suspended. Deficit and debt are going through the roof, while GDP is going through the floor; GDP decline in France in 2020 was 10%, double that of Germany. After a spate of Islamist terror attacks — France is the worst hit of all western nations, 270 deaths since 2012 — Macron has pushed forward a bill on security that has caused a crisis because of a provision restricting the filming of police officers. Human rights groups have shouted foul (thus denting Macron’s socially liberal image just a tad). The anti-lslamist war in the Sahel has become bogged down in the dust and the sand.

And, as if all this were not enough, Macron has mismanaged the Covid crisis. France, now on her second lockdown, has one of the highest infection rates in the developed world; the official death toll of 43,000 fails to adequately account for mortality in the maison. The country is under 8pm curfew, except for those areas where it is …6pm curfew. Everywhere, bars, restaurants and cinemas are shut. It might just be me, but Alouette radio seems to be playing The Specials Ghost Town rather a lot nowadays. Oh, and the ‘speedy’ virus variant that swept Britain is now out and about in France.

Then, there is the debacle of covid vaccination. According to the French health ministry, just 516 people had received the vaccination by January 3; in the same time frame, 200,000 people were immunised in Germany. In Bloomberg’s global vaccination tracker France is second…from last.

The deputy president of National Rally (née National Front), Jordan Bardella, declared that France had become the “laughing stock of the world”. Bardella could be expected to take a jab at Macron; more worrying for the President was the attitude of the French media whose default stance is to throw itself as an ideological Praetorian Guard around him (elites recognise their own with the keen certitude of dogs sniffing bottoms), but even Le Monde was prompted to ask, “Is France getting the dunce’s hat in Europe for vaccinations?”

There are just over 440 days before the next presidential election in France, and Macron unashamedly kicked off campaigning with his address to the nation on New Year’s Eve. He was not convincing. Usually, he manages the facsimile of Napoleonic grandeur in such broadcasts; this time he impersonated a snake-oil salesman. He tried to sell us a vision of a France resurgent by springtime, aided and abetted economically by an ever bigger and more prosperous EU, and with the Hexagon’s inhabitants blossoming in health due to vaccination.

Some hope. Aside from the problems with roll-out, an opinion poll by Ipsos Global Advisor indicates just 40% of French intend to have the coronavirus vaccine.

Or indeed, Macron’s medicine generally. The President’s fiscal policies have mostly helped the wealthy — despite increased state spending to defuse the Gilets Jaunes protests — and remain unpopular outside Paris’ plushest Arrondissements. The domestic political schedule is, to put it euphemistically, challenging, beginning with next month’s “law consolidating republican principles” intended to reinforce French life against any group or ideology that promotes its own agenda at the expense of liberty, equality and fraternity. While the government claims complete neutrality, absolutely no one is persuaded. Not least France’s large Muslim population.

Truth be told, Macron looks odder and more remote every passing day. While France suffers, the President spends  £540,709 per annum… on flowers. Beleaguered, and unpopular — his ratings are just 34% favourable — Macron has one tactic, and one tactic only for re-election, which is to tack Right, where the votes seem to be, given the laughable nature of the French Left. Then further Right again.

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We all break lockdown in France

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Reshuffling his cabinet, Macron replaced, significantly and signally, his Left-leaning interior minister with a conservative law-and-order hard-liner, Gérald Darmanin. Once upon a liberal dream time, Macron expressed scepticism about laïcité, the strict application of the secularism so dear to the heart of France, warning it could be used as a weapon against Islam. These days, he tells L’Express magazine: “They said I was a multiculturalist and I never was”, and gets Darmanin to helm the law on republican principles. When asked by online news site Brut whether he was concerned that his global image had changed from that of a “modern, liberal president” to “an authoritarian president”, Macron answered simply, “I don’t care.”

But nothing, nothing has so intrigued the watchers of political weather and Macron’s voyage rightwards than the recently reported lunch in a Montparnasse brasserie between Macron’s advisor Bruno Roger-Petit and Marion Maréchal. The niece of Marine Le Pen, and ex-RN deputy for Vaucluse, Maréchal is the Great Hard Right Hope of France, the beautiful princess across the Loire. Whether Roger-Petit was picking up political tips, or divining Maréchal’s presidential intentions is unknown. She has declared she has no wish for confrontation with her aunt, and disavowed running in 2022. But who knows?

Macron’s enthusiastic embrace of law-and-order and nationalist themes has — quelle surprise! — reduced Left support for his party, La République en Marche! Some 36 red/green LREM deputies have quit the fold in France’s lower house, depriving Macron of an outright majority. LREM is expected to be all but wiped-out in this summer’s nation-wide local elections. Mind you, LREM was never much more than a fissiparous fan-club for Manu.

It is not just on the home front that Macron has dropped the liberal, cultured clothing to reveal himself a puny De Gaulle seeking a chest-expander. On matters foreign, he has taken to Trump-type Twitter diplomacy, calling Nato “brain dead” and regularly chiding other national leaders — though chippily brooking no external criticism himself. When Greece and Turkey spatted last year Macron engaged in gunboat diplomacy. Literally. He sent a frigate to their end of the Med.

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When Asterix took on Covid-19

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Gone, too, is Macron’s globalist vision, to be replaced by Fortress France thinking. Only the other day he was down on the Spanish frontier, promising to stop illegal immigration by doubling border guard numbers to 4,800. Schengen free travel anyone? On 7 January, the border with Britain was once again shut to keep out the plague. (Mind you, I am not sure anyone can blame him for that, given that Bungling Boris is more than a match for Mismanaging Macron in covid containment.)

All of which leads to Président cambrioleur (The Burglar President), the recently published biography of Macron by journalist Corinne Lhaïk, who has shadowed her man for over a decade. The book is written with the cooperation of Manu and his wife Brigitte, but whether such aid was wise or an arrogant folly is arguable, to say the least.

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Oui, Macron emerges from Lhaïk’s pages as cultivated, brainy, possessed of superior “abstract intelligence” — an absolute plus in France, which does not share the English contempt for intellectuals. Lhaïk finds something touching too in his marriage to Brigitte, who “humanises him”. He needs it, since the Macron revealed by Lhaïk — who is, by the way, neither political dirt-digger or publishing gold-digger — is damning.

Macron is exposed as a political novice, unable to understand the relationship between the Elysee and Hotel Matignon, the residence of the prime minister, and burdened by the autocratic misapprehension that his word is a reality implemented.

It gets worse. Macron has a “brat side”, a tendency to childish provocation, and “lacks emotional intelligence”. He whines, just as Valéry Giscard d´Estaing did, that the French misunderstand him (“The French do not know who I am”), just as his family failed to comprehend his schoolboy absquatulation with Brigitte, his drama teacher and 26 years his senior.

He cannot delegate, or choose the right people, and is uninterested in the necessary presidential political art of winning friends and influencing people. So, even with the war in the Sahel — where some 6,000 French troops are valiantly, gloriously holding the line against Islamic insurgents, a just war if ever there there was one — receives next to no support from the Western powers it protects. Macron has utterly failed to build an international coalition of the willing.

The Macron in these pages has no core values, but keeps himself in power “by pecking the crumbs” of other people’s ideas — then opportunistically dropping them, embracing others if the public appetite changes. He might not be the West’s most unpopular and villainous president right now, but the man once nicknamed Jupiter for his lack of humility now resembles less a god than a Dauphin.