Paris wisdom said his statesmanlike pose, maintained for months, had been too risky, and helped forge a harmful image of a President unable to connect with le peuple. On the other hand, seeing the man himself on a walkabout in the once-thriving mining town of Denain, unable to hit the right tone to reassure locals protesting his vow to raise retirement age to 65, it was obvious he was doing himself no favours. “One needs to start with the real in order to progress to the ideal,” he told an angry middle-aged voter, in the gotcha! voice of a clever philosophy student in his tutor’s study.

You can’t deny Macron’s courage (or hubris): in Denain, Marine Le Pen received almost 42% of the vote; followed by the hard-Left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon with nearly 29%. Macron himself got a measly 15%. How tactically useful could it be for his run-off results to show up at the heart of his opponent’s constituency? It looked as if the President, who as a teenager dreamt of going on the stage, was now acting the part of the gritty local candidate — just as he overplayed the persona of the world diplomat capable of winning over Vladimir Putin in his Moscow lair a month ago.

On the other hand, half of any victory is self-belief; and after reducing France’s two historical mainstream parties to genuine bankruptcy, Macron may be right in thinking that he is the only one who can lay to rest the Curse Of The Windshield-Wiper Five-Year Presidencies (Right, Left, Right, Left) of the twenty-first century. Ever since Jacques Chirac amended the French Constitution in 2000 to whittle down by two years the old Septennat (seven-year) terms, no Fifth Republic president has won a second term in office.

The main thrust of his campaign is “Well, who else is there?” (“You’re not going to vote for the Fascist/Stalinist, are you?”), and he took great care to remain in sole possession of the field. Early after his 2017 victory, he picked compatible personalities among both the Républicains (his first PM Édouard Philippe, for instance) and the Socialists (see former Lyon Mayor Gérard Collomb), and sat back to watch the fissures on either side deepen.

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François Hollande’s Economy Minister for a year and a half, Macron nominally came from the Socialist Party, although he’d never joined (you don’t need to be an MP to become a Minister in France). He started off by betraying Hollande himself, swearing he would never run against him. Fast forward five years and the Socialists ended up committing seppuku-by-Hidalgo: the detested Paris Mayor scored 1.7% on Sunday, managing to get even worse results in some arrondissements of the capital. The Républicains, Nicolas Sarkozy’s own party, did little better. Their candidate Valérie Pécresse, a clear case of Capax imperii nisi imperasset — a woman everyone liked the idea of, whom an early poll even gave as run-off winner against Macron 52-48, until she actually started campaigning — fell to 4.8% of the vote.

In both cases, having failed to reach 5%, their respective parties are left having to fork out almost all campaigning costs, instead of receiving an €8 million refund. They currently do not have more than a few thousand in their coffers, and face annihilation. (Pécresse, who’s well-off but not remotely to Akshata Murty levels, actually advanced €5 million of her own money for her campaign, and will feel the bite; an attempt to start crowdfunding was met by jeers on social media yesterday.)

In both cases, too, Socialists and Républicains alike have seen a future without them — and it hurts. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Jeremy-Corbyn-like figure of France’s hard Left, was expected to do well, but not to come within hailing distance of the run-off, whatever his boasts during his long, rousing rally speeches. (He is a great tub-thumping orator, capable of both brutality and classical references in the same sentence.) Nationally, he got only 400,000 fewer votes than Marine Le Pen, having surged in the last few days as normal Left-wing voters suddenly decided not having a candidate would be unbearable. Mélenchon was once an unremarkable junior minister of Socialist PM Lionel Jospin, before he embarked on his journey to the Castro-Chavez-and-Putin fan club.

His progress, like Macron’s surprising surge, is due to an old reflex applied for the first time to the first round, le vote utile, best translated as “making one’s vote count”. Surveys show that up to 40% of voters made up their minds on whom to vote for during the final weekend. A significant proportion of those literally made their choice in the isoloirs, the privacy booths separated by flimsy curtains at the polling stations, where citizens are required by law to vote, having picked a minimum of two paper ballots each bearing each candidate’s name, then sliding the one they want into the official little blue envelope provided. (Both Zemmour and Mélenchon ran by far the best digital campaigns, but Mélenchon’s voters are much younger and much more likely to hit TikTok, Twitch, Telegram and WhatsApp: they frantically encouraged followers to proselytise their families until the last minute.)

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Mélenchon has now positioned himself firmly to take up the leadership of the traditional Left for the legislative elections in 40 days’ time, which should give him a crucial hold on local Socialist networks and grassroots, far stronger than the national party. Corbynisation may not be what they wish for, but they want to disappear even less.

As for the Républicains, they face an imminent two-thirds/one-third split. On one side, there are the moderates who will vote Macron in the run-off, thereafter vanishing within the La République En Marche blob. On the other, a smaller rump of hardliners from the South and from the Right of the Sarkozyste wing, such as former Party leader Laurent Wauquiez and Nice MP Eric Ciotti, who are angling for a decidedly Right-wing party — the Union des Droites, theorised by Zemmour — that would give them a clear identity and a shot at the presidency in 2027.

Politics is never simple and French politics can be especially Byzantine. At first sight, Eric Zemmour himself, a newcomer who rose and fell to 7% of the vote after nudging 18% three months ago, should only have a marginal influence in shaping the hallowed Union. But Zemmour managed to revive a French national conservatism that until then had lacked both theorists and follow-through. In his concession speech on Sunday night, in front of about a 1,000 fired-up militants, he immediately said that he wasn’t about to start negotiating conditions for his run-off vote: whatever differences he had with Marine Le Pen, he now was looking to France’s future, and would cast his ballot for her on 24 April. (Marine’s own niece, Marion Maréchal, had also announced on TV that she would vote for the aunt she had left for Zemmour. Eric Ciotti and Laurent Wauquiez, the Républicains, have themselves refused to call for a Macron vote.)

Zemmour’s unconditional endorsement looked very elegant, but it is also a shrewdly constructed trap for Le Pen. Rally after rally, he used to call out by name all of the “friends” he foresaw joining one day the future Union des Droites: from LR, the National Rally and others (he knows them all from his 30 years as political journalist). And every time, he ensured their names were applauded. Throughout, Marine herself walled herself in ominous silence. It is known that at National Rally Central, there are no words harsh enough for the Zemmour defectors: “traitors” and “bastards” are the printable ones. Nor does Marine want to share her glory with anyone; or worse, dilute her party, which from her father’s early days has been run more like a family concern than a political organisation. Any tall poppies got fired. Even her niece, elected the youngest French MP ever in Vaucluse in 2012 under the National Front banner, chafed against the restrictions her aunt put to her independence. As for theorising a new ideology, Marine, no great book reader, would rather spend time with her cats.

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This is not the way to build a big-tent ruling party, and the expectation is that even a Marine Le Pen who scores 49% to Emmanuel Macron’s 51% in two weeks’ time will spoil her opportunities afterwards. Meanwhile, Zemmour’s Reconquête will ally itself to the new-look Républicain rump and fight the June legislative elections in a new configuration in which she can only count on eight incumbent MPs. Of course, the landscape may change again should Le Pen actually win (bookmakers currently give it a little under 20% likelihood); but it’s almost impossible for the coalition-unfriendly National Rally to win a majority of MPs.

As for Emmanuel Macron, he is considering this devastated political landscape, which he wrought, smugly. He has made a desert and calls it peace: the vote utile, he feels, probably with good reason, will favour him. About one third of Zemmour voters are predicted to vote for him rather than for Le Pen; so should one good third of Mélenchon ones, the traditional Socialists, who when push comes to shove can’t face the possibility of her election. (To complicate things, another third of Mélenchonistes — the ones Emmanuel Macron met yesterday in and around Denain, whose parents and grandparents once regularly voted for the Communist Party — say in polls they would rather vote for her and her generous platform of salary raises and benefits).

And finally, nobody knows the abstention rate. Once again the French are faced with what they see as a miserable choice forced on them. If they pass on the isoloir, it will only be a matter of time before they take to the streets — and the true cost to France of the Macron-made desert will finally become clear.

Putin has admirers and apologists in many countries, from Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson in the United States to Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. He bought the German political establishment with gas pipelines and part of the British Conservative Party with roubles.

In France, however, the self-proclaimed, patriotic forces of anti-elite politics — on both the far-Right and the hard-left — admired Putin for free (give or take a Russian bank loan to Marine Le Pen in 2017). There is no equivalent degree of overt Putin worship in any other large, Western country — except possibly the United States.

When he held a peace summit with Emmanuel Macron just before he sent his tanks into Ukraine, Vladimir Putin humiliated the French president. But he also did him an unwanted favour: war in Ukraine has raised Emmanuel Macron’s chances of re-election in April from “pretty good” to “near-certain”.

After the first bombs fell, the Moscowteers  scrambled to distance themselves from the Russian president. Now, with scarcely a mea culpa, they have reverted to blaming the West for not giving in to Moscow on Nato expansion, and have resumed their mockery of Macron for his ill-fated peace missions to Putin last month.

This approach will appeal to part of their core support, which is viscerally anti-European, anti-American, and anti-Nato. But it is unlikely to impress the wider electorate.

Last Friday, Zemmour gave a strangely incoherent speech to a cheering and flag-waving rally of his faithful supporters in Chambéry in the French Alps: he both criticised Putin and defended him, appealing for peace and glorified war. “We know the Russians and the Russians know us. Putin’s Russia exists in the 19th century and regards war as a way of defending its strategic vision,” Zemmour said. “But the countries of the West no longer have the stomach for war… We need to consider the consequences of that.” The West, he implied, should actually be fighting “wars of civilisation” which “our elites will not accept”. In other words, he meant wars against Islam.

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Perhaps more surprising is what Zemmour didn’t say: he made no mention in Chambéry of Putin’s repeated threat to use nuclear weapons. The man who presents himself as the saviour of his nation now finds himself aligned with a man threatening to destroy it. So does Marine Le Pen and so does Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

As a result, I believe that the presidential election is all but over. President Macron has until Friday to enter the race formally. Despite the failure of his peace mission, the war will freeze the campaign and swing many moderate, non-ideological voters behind him.

Macron may or may not have been too indulgent with Putin last month. But three of his main adversaries have praised or idolised him for years. Even the centre-Right challenger Valérie Pécresse — no Putin fan — represents a party whose last Prime Minister, François Fillon, was until last week a salaried Moscow ally. After enormous pressure from Pécresse, Fillon finally resigned last week from the board of the Russian petro-chemical giant, Sibur.

Of course, Macron’s opponents still have a couple of straws to cling to: most damagingly, the confrontation with Russia will worsen fuel and food inflation, which was already threatening a Macron second term. It will, however, also give the President political cover to take action, such as temporary tax cuts, to ease price rises — steps that would normally have been impossible just before a presidential vote.

Meanwhile, Moscow will doubtless turn several armoured divisions of online trolls and fake social media accounts on the French campaign. Yet a Moscow blitz of fake news against Macron was expected anyway. Its effect will also be limited: it will mostly be seen by the anti-European, anti-Nato, Macron-detesting portion of the electorate, which would never have voted for him in any case.

This raises a more fundamental question: why was Putin so popular in France in the first place?

The 2022 election may be over, but the fellow-travelling of the three leading election candidates is a stark reminder of the fragility of the French political status quo. Disaffected French cultural figures, from Gérard Dépardieu to Michel Houellebecq, are also long-standing Putin fans, infected by a variant of the pro-Soviet virus which swept through much of French intellectual life in the Fifties.

Will the surge of nationalism in French politics be damaged by its association with Vladimir Putin? In the short term, yes. In the longer term, however, the same problems will produce the same resentments and the same arguments. The key man here is Éric Zemmour.

On the Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a Jurassic politician, fighting his last election. For him, defending Putin was part of the unthinking baggage of being anti-American, anti-Nato and anti-European. Ditto for Marine Le Pen. In any case, her political star is waning. Moscow certainly thinks so; she was refused Russian loans this time around.

Of the Three Moscowteers, Zemmour has the most to lose. He represents — or represented — a rising power in French politics, if not for 2022 then for 2027.

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For Mélenchon and Le Pen, Putin was their “enemy’s enemy”. Their thinking went no deeper than that. Zemmour epitomises something else: the strange attraction that Putin has come to hold on parts of the intellectual hard-Right in France and elsewhere. Zemmour admires Putin not despite what he is but because of what he is. Although Jewish himself, he has long idolised Putin as a defender of “Christian values” and “male values” against the onslaught of liberalism, feminism and gay rights.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that a new hashtag has appeared on French Twitter in recent days: #VladimirZemmour. French media and political opponents have started to trace the many links and similarities between Putinism and Zemmourism. Both men exploit tendentious narratives of national decline and national betrayal. Both shamelessly rewrite their country’s history to exaggerate past glories and nurse grudges against rival nations or the forces of “internationalism”.

For Putin, the indivisible Russian people and Russia’s natural right to be one of the world’s great powers have been betrayed by his weak or foolish predecessors and by the anti-Russian aggression of the West. For Zemmour, France’s natural superiority and right to cultural domination have been eroded over the centuries by foreign and internationalist conspiracies and by the betrayals of its own political classes. The latest betrayal is “le grand remplacement” — an allegedly deliberate plan by “international finance” and “the elites” to replace the white race by brown and black people.

In 2016, Zemmour wrote that the Russian President was “the last bastion against the hurricane of the politically correct which, starting in America, has destroyed all the traditional structures of family, religion and nation”. He is “the only European leader to defend traditional society, rooted in its own history and culture. All other Western leaders have turned the rootless, self-empowered individual into a jealous and demanding God.”

Two years later, he added: “I dream of a French Putin emerging but there is none…” Three years after that, Zemmour stopped being an essayist and TV pundit and decided to run for the role of “French Putin” himself.

In the large back-library of Zemmour’s Putin panegyrics, you will find scarce mention of the dismantlement of any semblance of democracy in Russia, and the imprisonment and poisoning of opponents. But while Western governments and businesses have ignored or chosen to live with these crimes. Zemmour has implicitly endorsed them. As recently as last September, Zemmour said that France should abandon Nato and the EU and enter a “Russian alliance…that would be far more reliable”.

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Until now, Zemmourist converts from the centre-Right — mostly very young or retired, well-educated and well-off — have brushed off such excesses. They prefer to focus on Zemmour’s energy and his eloquence in skewering the failures and evasions of the liberal, pro-European consensus. Yet they are now confronted with facts that they preferred to ignore: Zemmour’s gut instincts are authoritarian and undemocratic. His Putin-worship is not a tangential flirtation to annoy “the elites”. It is the core of Zemmourism.

As I have argued before, Zemmour’s political project was always long-term. It hoped to succeed over two election campaigns, not one. But I believe that Zemmour has been lastingly discredited by his Putin worship. In his place, another figure will doubtless emerge to pursue his vision of a strong, nationalist anti-European Right into the 2027 campaign (when Macron, if re-elected, cannot run again).

One of the likely candidates for that role is Marine Le Pen’s estranged niece, Marion Maréchal — although she is another long-standing Putin-fellow-traveller. Yet the New Right will not go away in France any more than it will in the United States. Memories fade. The core issues of identity, fear of Islamism and the need for better-shared prosperity will remain.

Part of the identity of the New Right is to mock international and European institutions, even the very idea of human rights or international law. No doubt the muddles and compromises of Nato and the EU will be mocked again and again in the coming months or even years as those flawed organisations struggle to support Ukraine without firing a shot and risking nuclear war.

It would, all the same, be pleasant to imagine that some on the new, nationalist Right — and not just in France — might start to reconsider and regret some of the Strange Gods they have worshipped in recent years. Vladimir Putin — a corrupt, violent, anti-democratic man who detests the values of the West — has been recruited as a poster-boy for French and American ultra-patriotism. Many people who, like Eric Zemmour, are sincerely devoted to the values of the past, now find themselves trapped on the wrong side of history.

Three weeks ago, Pécresse polled as a possible runoff winner (52-48%) against incumbent Emmanuel Macron. But the leaders of LR, the latest iteration of the party of Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, are painfully aware that if their candidate ends up not clearing the first-round hurdle, they might find themselves paddling unrescued in an ice-cold sea. In recent weeks, we have witnessed the complete disintegration of the historic French Left — could the centre-Right go the same way?

The thing to know about France’s traditional political parties, whether on the Left and Right, is that they are all a pit of voles. Not for nothing is Astérix the Gaul author René Goscinny’s other great comics series, Le Grand Vizir Iznogoud, all about a poisonous, pocket-sized Vizier in medieval Baghdad, hopelessly plotting to seize power from his boss, the benign Caliph — and being endlessly foiled, à la Wile E. Coyote.

The Iznogoud series has been translated, but unlike Astérix never achieved much success outside France. Yet here it is accepted as the other half of Goscinny’s essential civilisational portrait of French society. It was included by shrewd aides in the context briefing notes handed to Angela Merkel before her first meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy (who happens to share Iznogoud’s diminutive stature, raging ambition, and notoriously volcanic temper). “Je veux être Calife à la place du Calife!” — the irate Iznogoud’s leitmotiv is a classic of corporate as well as party politics. Indeed, it has become the shorthand used in almost any fractious work situation, from primary school bureaucracies to the competing factions of the French Catholic Church, most recently seen locked in a deadly but discreet battle over the restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral.

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That this usually ends in self-destruction ­— sometimes quasi-annihilation, as evidenced with the 2% polling estimates currently scored by the Socialist candidate, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo — doesn’t stop anyone. (A new documentary chronicling the decline of the French Socialist Party since the 14-year François Mitterrand monarchic presidency is called La Disparition for a reason.) Le Team Spirit is no staple of French politics.

At the big rally that had imprudently been billed as “make or break”, every Républicain grandee, starting with the Sarkozy entourage, started slamming Pécresse — thereby fuelling the most negative media coverage of anyone in the campaign to date. Her delivery was wooden, the décor dwarfed her, her speech was both “bureaucratic” and “inflammatory” (she named, seeming to decry it, Le Grand Remplacement theory, a Zemmour staple alleging indigenous French populations are being replaced by immigrants). Her voice coach, a highly respected stage actor, was named and shamed on Twitter. By midweek, post-rally polls projected Pécresse in fourth position (14%) for the first round on 10 April, after Emmanuel Macron (25%), Marine Le Pen (17%) and Eric Zemmour (15%). By Friday morning, one poll had Pécresse as low as 12%.

One way of looking at this election is to dismiss it as the predictable Second Coronation of Emmanuel Macron. The “Schrödinger candidate” has yet to declare formally that he is running, protesting that he hasn’t quite made up his mind yet, even though fundraising emails have already gone out in the name of his party, La République en Marche (LREM), to hundreds of thousands of email addresses collected five years ago, and constantly updated. If Macron wins the 24 April runoff, he will have broken the curse of the last three presidential elections, where no incumbent gets a second term.

Seeing her as the most dangerous candidate, Macron’s spin doctors were no slouches when it came to trashing Pécresse, with discreet sexist jabs. The French at large have no problem voting for women politicians; it’s politicians themselves, largely male, who block female promotion, all the while protesting the opposite. Look at the all-male, all-white core of Emmanuel Macron’s Élysée Cabinet and Spads; the clone-like thirtysomethings in narrow bespoke suits who all look like their boss and are right now in the process of resigning from their current jobs to join his non-campaign.

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Apart from his wife Brigitte, the President’s first circle contains no women. The ones in his Cabinet are either sidelined, like the transparent Defence Minister, Florence Parly; novelty appointments like the erotic novelist Marlène Schiappa as Minister Delegate for Citizenship; or nose-on-the-grindstone drones who get replaced when they burn out.

Meanwhile, the President did presidential things, with varying degrees of success. His would-be shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Kyiv, talked up by his staff, achieved nothing except to convince Vladimir Putin that France would, as usual, play a divisive game rather than push for European unity against Moscow. There was a performative One Ocean Summit hastily convened at Brest earlier this month, to burnish Macron’s green credentials and provide a superpower photo-op (albeit without Putin, Biden, Boris Johnson or Xi Jinping). Tax rebates, “social bonuses” — €100 for all State pensioners in March, for instance — and deferments are generously being granted, even though the National Court of Accounts has formally warned of France’s ballooning debt.

Make no mistake: Macron is running — and his dream opponent is Marine Le Pen. He trashed her back in 2017 in their only campaign debate, and expects to do so again, this time with one hand behind his back. In the past five years, she has worked on making her renamed National Rally party seem more acceptable — backtracking on remarks about France’s history; about Islam, which she pointedly differentiates from Islamism; and about the Euro (which she no longer wants to leave). This is all music to Macron’s ears: dressed up as a Centrist, he’s confident she can’t really compete on his turf.

So are members of her own National Rally. The result has been an exodus to Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête !. So far, a dozen or so Lepénistes, including influential local grandees, have splashily joined Zemmour. Each arrival is staged with viral social media videos in which le Z himself — who knows them all from his three decades as a political journalist — greets them with a huge smile and much backslapping in front of his rue Jean-Goujon campaign headquarters, half a mile from the Élysée Palace.

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There’s a feeling of a chicken being methodically plucked prior to becoming a Poule au Pot. The biggest prize could be within reach: Marion Maréchal, Marine’s own niece. Maréchal — who was elected France’s youngest MP in history, aged 22, in 2012, but stepped back from politics five years ago — has said she agrees more with Zemmour’s ideas than her aunt’s. If she formally joins Reconquête !, Zemmour only needs to turn on the hob under the pot, and add leeks, carrots and onions.

Until the end of last week, Le Pen was still leading the polls behind Macron, but the momentum and the money were tilting to Zemmour’s side. (Le Pen had to get a loan from a Russian-influenced Budapest bank just to keep her campaign afloat, while Reconquête ! is currently garnering so many small and big cheques that many have not yet been cashed). On Friday afternoon a Paris-Match/IFOP poll showed Zemmour at 16.5%, just ahead of Le Pen (16) and Pecresse (15), while Macron led at 25%.

Zemmour’s rallies are packed, modelled on Donald Trump’s in 2016; like Trump’s, videos showing the long lines waiting for admittance swamp social media even before the start of the speeches. In two months, Reconquête ! passed its 100,000th member : Zemmour promises to personally cook an Aligot — a traditional Auvergnat recipe of potatoes, melted cheese, butter and cream — for the 150,000th.

If this sounds unexpectedly Instagram-worthy for French politics, it’s because Zemmour’s social media and internet team is entirely made up of enthusiastic digital natives, led by a 32-year-old former LR parliamentary assistant, Samuel Lafont. Lafont, who spent time observing US politicians, can unerringly quote ads and videos from Trump to Ted Cruz. He boasts of being able to deploy 1,500 eager, young volunteers across France to “flood the zone” with graphics, tweets, videos and TikToks. He tells me: “Where the Pécresse team has produced perhaps ten visuals, all carefully edited and checked to fit her campaign’s approved graphic design, we’ve sent out a thousand. Who cares if they don’t exactly match?”

Few, even Donald Trump, believed America’s 2016 election upset would happen. The result may not work out that way for Team Zemmour (although many old-time Paris pollsters like the legendary Stéphane Rozès or OpinionWay vice-president Bruno Jeambart have questioned whether his figures have been underestimated). But one month after the presidential elections will come the legislative ones, and a defeated and scattered French Right will be ripe for what Zemmour and his backers have been calling for from the start: a shift in the tectonic plates from the post-Pécresse Républicains all the way to Reconquête !, leaving the French centre to survive out at sea, heads bobbing just above the waterline in the icy night.

As the weeks tick by, President Emmanuel Macron’s opinion poll score has scarcely moved. He has stayed within a narrow band of 23-26% of first round support for six months — eight to ten points ahead of the pursuing pack.

Below him there is an increasingly vicious scrap between three candidates of the far-Right and the right. When Éric Zemmour, the new poster-boy of ultra-nationalism, rises in the polls, Marine Le Pen, the old poster-girl, goes down. When Valérie Pécresse, the would-be saviour of the moderate, traditional Right, gains ground, Zemmour and Le Pen retreat. The Right-wing candidates expend much of their energy attacking one another. Macron remains untouched.

Below that, there is a six or seven-way scrap for the soul of the Left, whose only prize is likely to be a pointless fourth or fifth place in the first round of the election on 10 April. The Left, like the Right, spends much of its time savaging itself. Once again, Macron remains unscathed.

The campaign is frozen partly because of the Covid pandemic, whose towering Omicron wave seems finally to be abating. A recent IFOP poll found that only 52% of French voters have spoken of the election with friends, compared to 78% at this time in the 2017 campaign. The main topics of conversation in France are, according to the IFOP poll: Covid, Covid and Covid.

The campaign has been further (and deliberately) anaesthetised by President Macron. He has delayed (and delayed again) his formal entry to the race, instead preferring to campaign from within the relative safety of the presidential bubble, to the fury of the other candidates. Macron has made it clear that he will run, but intends to postpone a formal declaration for as long as possible. The deadline is 4 March.

This is especially a problem for Pécresse, who rightly sees herself as the only candidate who could beat Macron in the run-off on 24 April. She wants to make the campaign all about Pécresse vs Macron. For now, he is like a boxer dancing out of her reach.

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The Emperor Napoleon once said that he’d rather have a lucky general than a good one. Macron has not always been a lucky President but he seems to be a lucky candidate. His five-year term was troubled by the Gilets Jaunes rebellion in peripheral France in 2018-9. Almost half of his term has been dominated by the Covid pandemic.

And yet he had enormous electoral fortune in 2017, winning the presidency almost by default in his first ever political campaign. Luck is smiling on him again: just as the Covid pandemic began to fade as a reason to evade full-time campaigning, along came Vladimir Putin and 130,000 Russian soldiers on Ukraine’s eastern border.

Still, electoral considerations do not explain why Macron travelled to Moscow yesterday to try to defuse the Ukraine crisis. Macron believes that he can talk to Putin in a way that no other Western leader can.

Yes, the Russian president may well be stringing the French president along. He has done so before: Macron’s previous attempts to soft-soap the Russian president came to nothing and raised suspicions in eastern Europe that the young French president does not understand Putin or Russia.

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Yet Putin tells Macron (and Macron’s people tell the New York Times) that he finds conversations with Macron more “profound” than with other leaders. Putin spoke to the French president on the phone four times last week.

Will we shortly see Emmanuel Macron with a winged collar and a walrus moustache holding a piece of paper and proclaiming peace in our time? Some of the commentary on the French president’s visit to the Kremlin implies that Macron contemplates a Chamberlain-like betrayal.

This is misleading. For one thing, Macron does not have the power to commit Nato or the European Union to anything that other governments disapprove of. For another, Macron has consulted closely with Ukraine and his Western partners. Macron believes that he can agree with Putin the terms for a “time-out”, if not an immediate “way-out”. His approach has more in common with the views of the Ukrainian government than Washington or London’s.

Whatever the outcome, Macron can expect an electoral windfall. If he helps to broker a new détente between Putin and the West, he will be the hero of the hour. If he fails and Nato plunges into a serious confrontation with Moscow, Macron will be the nation’s independent-minded, internationally respected leader at a time of world crisis.

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Should the French election therefore be considered as done and dusted nine weeks before the first round? Some people are beginning to think so. Others say that the campaign hasn’t started yet; anything is still possible.

In the first of those camps, is The Economist’s data unit. They crunched the stats on recent polls last week and decided that Macron has a 79% chance of re-election. In the second camp, there is the latest in a series of unconventional polls by IFOP, which asks voters who they think will win. Only 21% of those questioned last week said that they believed in a Macron victory — a six-point drop in seven days. (Admittedly, the poll gave even lower scores to all the other candidates).

Why has the popular mood darkened? A spike in prices for food, housing, petrol, diesel and domestic gas has erased any sense of prosperity remaining from France’s economic recovery last year (7% growth, the highest in the G7). Additionally, Macron’s generally sound handling of the Covid pandemic has been muddied in recent weeks by a confusing series of rule changes on the testing of children in schools.

Conversations with senior figures in the Macron camp suggest that the President remains confident of victory. “Isn’t the The Economist’s 79% overpriced?” I asked one leading presidential ally. “Yes,” he replied. “I’d put his chances of winning at no more than 65%.”

Indeed, the President’s people believe that no other candidate has shown presidential stature; none has been able to raise themselves above the internal quarrels in their own camps. If Macron has been able profitably to delay his entry to the race, it is largely thanks to his opponents. “If there were another candidate, or two other candidates, polling at 20% or more of first round support, Macron would have been obliged to campaign more actively,” another Macron ally said. “As things stand, it’s him at 24-25% and all the rest a floor below or a couple of floors below. He has the luxury of staying out of the race for as long as he can.”

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The impotence of the French Left

By John Lichfield

The President’s strategy is to squeeze the first-round battle into as short a period as possible. He will refuse to take part in televised debates with up to 13 other candidates. He will fight a lightning campaign in which he will present himself as both a tested leader and an imaginative but cautious reformer — someone with a positive vision for France’s future but no longer the white-collar revolutionary of 2017.

To observers both in France and abroad, Macron’ electoral strength may seem odd. He attracts intense detestation, and his record is uneven. He has some legislative achievements, but his reform programme was truncated by two years of health crisis and lockdowns. His promise to make France a land of opportunity (while preserving much of the welfare state) is, at best, a work in progress. But while Macron may have failed to build a robust, centrist party, he has a strong personal following — what pollster Brice Teinturier calls a “fan-zone”.

Macron’s support still straddles, as it did in 2017, parts of both the old centre-Left and centre-Right. Its median point might be further Right than it was in 2017, but Macron still commands the allegiance of a large chunk of the old, pro-European “managerial” Left — people who once voted for Presidents François Mitterrand and François Hollande.

A BVA poll last October found that 54% of Socialist sympathisers were tempted to vote for Macron in the first round on 10 April. France’s generous Covid lockdown support programmes for businesses and individuals has convinced some moderate Left-wingers (by no means all) that the President is one of them. Macron has to expand that “fan-zone” of around a quarter of the electorate to 50% (and one vote) to win the two-candidate run-off on 24 April.

All depends on the identity of his opponent. If Marine Le Pen or Éric Zemmour reaches the second round, Macron can probably rely on reinforcements from part of the Left and from the pro-European, moderate centre-Right to keep the far-Right out of the Elysée Palace. If he is matched against Valérie Pécresse, his task becomes harder. The two-week second round campaign would be a close-run thing but not necessarily his Waterloo.

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Three ways Macron could lose France

By John Lichfield

Macron’s people are confident that he would beat Pécresse. “Some of the Left will vote for her to defeat Macron but she doesn’t have the spark, that extra quality she will need to beat him,” one Macron ally said.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. If the cost-of-living crisis worsens, she may not need much of a spark. As Teinturier warns: “Purchasing power is the one factor that can most easily destroy support for an incumbent.” In short, it’s not all over. After all, French elections often throw up an unexpected plot twist.

There is, however, a strong chance that Macron will be the first President to be re-elected by the French in 20 years. He would also be the only President of the Fifth Republic to be re-elected without having first lost de facto power to the opposition in a parliamentary election.

If he is re-elected, Emmanuel Macron will become the most powerful, experienced leader in the European Union — with ambitions to make the EU stronger. Macron-haters outside France should start bracing themselves for that possibility: he may not be running yet, but the signs suggest he is well on the way to crossing the finish line in first place.

Within a few hours, Roussel found himself under heavy bombardment, as other factions of the French Left lined up to pelt him with insults and insinuations. Why was a Left-wing politician promoting hard-Right, identitarian notions such as “French gastronomy”? What did he mean by excluding couscous? What about the ecological implications of beef-rearing? And the health risks of cheese? And wine?

Despite all the excitement, the incident will have zero impact on the outcome of the French election in April. Communist Party support in France topped 20% a half century ago; it now hovers at around 2%.

All the same, such attacks on a pleasant, rather old-fashioned “lefty” like Roussel tell a revealing story of the self-destructive tribalism of the French Left. France is now a “socialist” country which no longer votes Left in national elections: for the second presidential election in succession, no Left-wing candidate will reach the second round.

And yet, until five years ago, France had a Socialist president and a Socialist majority in parliament. Even today, most of its big, thriving cities — Paris, Marseille, Montpellier, Lilles, Nantes, Rennes, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Strasbourg — still have Socialist or Green mayors. Over 61% of French GDP is spent by the state, compared to 45% in the US, 49% in the UK and 51% in Germany. Support for what would be considered Left-wing ideas in other countries — state intervention, abortion, gay rights — is strong.

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Three ways Macron could lose France

By John Lichfield

There are at least eight Left-wing candidates for April’s presidential election. By some calculations, there are as many as 12 of them — including two flavours of Trotskyist, two socialists and several greens. None has more than 10% of the vote; none has much chance of being in the top four when France votes in the first round on 10 April. Between them they have around 26% of first round support, compared to the 43% of voters who backed a Left or green candidate in 2012.

The Left in Britain and Germany also fell to a low ebb recently, but managed to resurrect themselves — seizing the Chancellorship in Germany and topping the opinion polls in Britain. Yet no such Lazarus-like revival is likely in France for many years, if ever. Why?

The most obvious explanation is the implosion, as a national force, of Le Parti Socialiste, which was created by François Mitterrand in the Seventies to herd the scattered Left and put the shepherd (himself) into the Elysée Palace.

Ten years ago, the PS candidate, François Hollande, took 28.6% of the vote in the first round of a presidential election. Its current standard-bearer, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is running at around 3%.

There are three reasons for the PS’s rapid decline: two circumstantial and one fundamental. The first is the emergence of a powerful centrist force in French politics: President Macron has hijacked between 8 to 10 points of the old “moderate Left” which used to vote Socialist.

The second concerns the weaknesses and personal antagonisms of a new generation of Left-wing leaders. Their jealousies and limitations will be illustrated in the next few days by the psychodrama of a People’s Primary — a well-meaning attempt by leftist academics and activists to unite the French Left behind one presidential candidate. But like all such attempts, it will only divide the Left further.

To understand why Le Primaire Populaire is doomed to fail, you have to look at the third and most important reason for the decline of the Left: the changing social and political geology of France.

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As in other countries, mass, blue-collar support for Left-wing parties evaporated long ago. In the first round of the 2017 presidential election, two in five blue-collar workers voted for Marine Le Pen and other far-Right candidates. In their place, the broad Left (including the Greens) is now mostly populated by an educated, middle-class and urban grouping — hence its success in big cities, like Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux. Such a Left — more intellectual than emotional; more interested in ideology than in solidarity — finds it irksome to have a dominant, pragmatic worldview or a single, respected leader.

In the absence of any unifying identity, a new French polling organisation, Cluster-17, believes that talk of Left and Right no longer makes sense in France. Rather, it divides France into 16 “clusters” or tribes of voters, seven of which include or overlap with chunks of the old “Left”.

Often, these groups are contradictory. There is, for example, a fiercely secular French Left, which is as anxious about radical Islam, as well as an anti-imperialist, anti-racist French Left, which resists attempts to curb Islamist influence. There is a pro-European Left and an anti-European Left. There is a pro-nuclear power Left and an anti-nuclear Left.

“Political allegiances in France have become much more complex and individual,” Professor Jean-Yves Dormagen of Montpellier University, the founder of Cluster-17, tells me. “Instead of large voting blocs there is an archipelago of voting clusters. Social class, education, wealth, all remain factors but so are cultural attitudes.”

The key word there is individual. In France belief in action for the common good (fraternité/egalité) is carved on every town hall and imprinted on the national DNA. But the French are also a nation of fiercely individual individuals (liberté). And the collapse of Left-wing solidarity means that those who value “common action” do so in an increasingly “individual” way. This was displayed, ad absurdum at times, by the Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018-9, which instantly detested anyone who emerged as its leader. Politics should be abolished, the Gilets Jaunes believed; everyone should run the country from laptops on their kitchen tables.

This new belief in citizen power is more pronounced on the French Left than on the French Right, where the belief in a Providential Man (or Woman) remains strong. To misquote Charles de Gaulle, how can you hope to govern a French Left which has 265 different interpretations of “solidarity”?

Enter the independent “Popular Primary”: a hopeless attempt by Left-wing academics and activists to unite the Left before April. Although called a “primary”, it is more like a giant, online opinion poll to be held on 27 to 30 January. Up to 250,000 self-selected participants will be asked to give a score between 1 and 5 to the seven candidates chosen by the organisers.

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Three of the “leading”, publicly-declared Left-wing contenders — Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the hard-left La France Insoumise, Yannick Jadot, the official candidate of the Green party and Anne Hidalgo — have been included without their consent. All have said they will ignore the result.

There are also three obscure candidates chosen by the organisers, including a socialist-ecologist who campaigned by going on a 10-day hunger strike. Finally, there is the woman who will probably win the primary, because she is the only well-known personality actively taking part: Christiane Taubira, a former justice minister, a great orator and a heroine for those on the Left pushing through a law legalising gay marriage in 2013.

Taubira said originally that she would only run if she was widely recognised as the candidate who could unite the Left. She now says that she will definitely run in April if she “wins” the primary; she may even run if she loses it. In other words, she will probably end up splitting the Left even more.

In sum, the French Left — dedicated to common action on behalf of the masses — is dominated by obsessive individuals who refuse to work together. If a great new leader of the Left were to emerge — another François Mitterrand or another Léon Blum, the Prime Minister of the Popular Front in the Thirties — it is doubtful whether he or she could impose his or her personality or programme.

And so an obvious question arises: how long can France remain a “socialist” country if the country has no Left capable of governing? The small, mostly sensible changes made by Macron since 2017 have been denounced by “the Left” as catastrophic. The French state remains — for good or ill — the biggest in Europe outside Scandinavia.

Yet three of the top four candidates in the polls talk of shrinking government; only Marine Le Pen would expand it.

Here lies the great paradox of the French Left: voters who support a babel of leftist candidates in Round One on 10 April could decide the outcome in Round Two on 24 April. The two-round French election system used to give a casting vote to centrists. It will go once again this year to voters of the Left, who face a choice between President Macron and whichever candidate of the Right or Far Right reaches the run-off with him: Valérie Pécresse, Marine le Pen or (less likely) Éric Zemmour.

Five years after the country’s last socialist President, the French Left finds itself with three options: staying at home; voting for a candidate that they abhor; or voting for a candidate that they merely hate.

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.

The girls were well turned-out; many of them came from the kind of well-heeled or intellectual families once called “BCBG” — bon chic, bon genre — living in the western arrondissements of Paris. Others came from Neuilly-sur-Seine, the richest commune in France, just outside the city boundary (where Nicolas Sarkozy was once the mayor).

Whenever I see Valérie Pécresse I think of those walks. She has the same cheerful, determined, understated “BCBG” look. That is hardly a surprise; she was educated at that same convent school as my daughters.

The dual aim of Sainte-Marie de Neuilly is to turn out faithful and traditional Catholics girls but also tough, intelligent young women capable of competing with men in a men’s world. My non-French daughters hated it for the most part, but it educated them well.

Pécresse, 54, now stands at the entrance to a labyrinth which could lead her next year to win a competition which no French woman has ever won: to be President of the Republic. Last weekend, she became the first woman to be chosen as presidential candidate for the French centre-right, the political family of Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Ten years ago ,that would have made her one of the favourites, even the favourite, to be the next President. But life is more complicated now — and it is growing more complicated by the day: part of the centre-right has emigrated to President Emmanuel Macron, while other sections have shifted to two far-Right candidates, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour.

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Meanwhile, Pécresse — who has been President of the greater Paris region, Ile-de- France, since 2015 — is little known outside the Paris area; and Paris is not liked in the rest of France. Before she won a closed primary of the main centre-right party, Les Républicains, on Saturday she was running a poor 4th in the national opinion polls on 8 to 10% of support for the first round of the presidential election on 10 April.

But two post-primary polls in recent days have boosted her to 14% and 17% respectively. In other words, she is already pushing for a place, ahead of her two far-Right rivals, in the two-candidate second round on 24 April.

The election is, of course, still a long way away. Opinion polls bounces come and go. Just ask Eric Zemmour, who is sinking steadily after surging from 0% to 19% in the Autumn. The only exception to this rule seems to be President Macron, who continues to float serenely ahead of the pack on 23 to 25%.

All the same, Macron and his chieftains and supporters are worried. They are confident that the President would beat either Le Pen or Zemmour if they reached the second round. They are far less certain that he would beat Pécresse.

They know fully well that she appeals to a chunk of the electorate which dislikes Macron and would like a change, albeit not too much change. The prospect of a woman as President would, in itself, appeal to the perpetual French dissatisfaction with incumbents; there has been no female leader in France since the regent Marie de Médicis four centuries ago.

Pécresse, though more socially conservative and fiscally stringent than Macron, would also be more acceptable in a run-off to parts of the French Left — simply because she is not Macron.

But can she reach Round Two? Ultimately, in the first round, some of her advantages become handicaps.

A large part of the wider French Right and even her own party want radical change on crime, migration and Europe. Pécresse may be more socially conservative than Macron: she was once a leading figure in a movement to try to block gay marriage, though she now accepts “marriage for all” should not be challenged. But the French Right regard Pécresse, correctly, as a continuation of the centrist consensus which has survived, with a few twists and turns, from Chirac through Sarkozy, François Hollande and Macron.

And unlike Le Pen and Zemmour, Pécresse is a typical product of the French political elite. After jumping two classes at Sainte-Marie-de-Neuilly and gaining the top mark in the baccalauréat at the age of 16, she went to a leading business school and to the elite civil service college Ecole Nationale d’Adminisration (ENA). She then taught at the leading political school, Science-Po. She is pro-European and pro-business. She is married to an engineer-turned-senior-businessman and has three children.

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As a result, the response by harder-line Républicains or by Zemmouristes to her victory at the weekend was brutal. They called her a “girouette” (weather-vane), “Valérie Princesse”, “Valérie Traitresse” and “Macron in a skirt”.

Perhaps anticipating this, Pécresse promised in her acceptance speech to be a new kind of President: one who would break with the past and keep promises. She also emphasised that, unlike Le Pen and Zemmour, she was capable of winning on 24 April and “turning the page on Macron”.

In truth, she will struggle in the next four months to keep her own party together, let alone unite the wider French Right. Even her acceptance speech was publicly criticised by the man she crushed 61-39% in the second round of Les Républicains’ primary.

Eric Ciotti, who represents Nice in the French national assembly, is closer in most respects to the views of Zemmour and Le Pen on Islam and migration than those of Pécresse. He complained that her victory oration omitted his most eye-catching proposal: a French Guantanamo for suspected Islamist radicals and an end to the “droit du sol” — the right to French citizenship of anyone born on French soil.

In response, Pécresse again rejected both those ideas but promised that Ciotti would be a big part of her campaign; her first visit was to his village in the mountains above Nice. It was a shrewd move and her political skills should certainly not be underestimated. Pécresse says she is “two parts Angela Merkel and one part Margaret Thatcher”. She is not, she says, une dame de fer (iron lady) like Thatcher but une dame de faire (a woman who gets things done).

Yes, she was given little chance by pundits (including this one) of winning the five-candidate primary last week. But she proved herself with talent and cunning.

The number of Les Républicains party members zoomed from 80,000 to 140,000 in the weeks before the vote as “sympathisers” handed over €30 in annual party dues. All five candidates had encouraged supporters, in effect, to buy votes. The Pécresse camp, with the enormous population of greater Paris behind it, “bought” the most (quite legally). And it undoubtedly had an impact: she beat the favourite, the former EU Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, by only 1,200 votes in Round One to go forward in second place to round two.

Yet there were other factors, too. In the four televised primary debates, Barnier looked tired and grouchy; Ciotti slick and passionate. Pécresse, meanwhile, was calm, fluent and well-drilled. She appealed to the party’s hard Right wing by proposing two constitutional changes to make it easier for France to block migration and deal with radical Islam. She shone like a beacon in a deep pink jacket among the shiny dark suits.

But now comes the real campaign. And this is where her troubles could begin.

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The Calais crisis can't be solved

By John Lichfield

One way to look at this election is that France, like Gaul under Julius Caesar, has been divided into three parts. The Left — remember them? — still commands just under 30% of the votes. They are divided, irretrievably it appears, between seven different candidates: two Trotskyists, a Communist, two Socialists, a Green and the hard-left nationalist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. None, at present, has more than 11% of the vote. They are unlikely to get near the top four, never mind the top two, in the first round.

There is then a wide band of pro-European, pro-business, centre and centre-right — in effect politics as usual — candidates, taking in Macron but also Pécresse. They have maybe 30% to 40% support.

Finally, there is a chunk of just over 30% of far-Right and hard-Right voters who want to turn everything on its head. They are anti-European, ultra-nationalist and anti-migrant. They detest what they see as a Left-tinged media consensus against strong action to reduce European power, end migration, tackle crime and shackle Islam (not just radical Islamism). They include the supporters of Le Pen and Zemmour, but also a big slice of members and voters of Les Républicains — two-fifths of them judging by the result of last Saturday’s primary.

Eric Ciotti has said that, faced with a choice between Macron and Zemmour in Round Two, he would vote for Zemmour. Yet in 2017, Pécresse voted for Macron rather than Le Pen. She left Les Républicains two years later because she said they were drifting towards the far-Right, and only rejoined just before the primary. In other words, she and Ciotti are in the same party but not in the same ideological “third” of France.

To win next April, then, Pécresse has to persuade many hard-Right and far-Right voters to take another chance on a mainstream politician who says that she shares their anger and fears. She needs, above all, the Zemmour bubble to burst, but not to burst too much; she needs his supporters who have abandoned Le Pen to stay with him. Otherwise, Le Pen will return to an unassailable first round position, just behind Macron.

At the same time, Pécresse needs to reclaim some of the moderate, pro-European centre-right voters who now support the President. That will be difficult if she is also to make a full-blooded pitch to the Ciotti-Zemmour-Le Pen third of France.

Her BCBG cheerful toughness will appeal to some voters. It will enrage others. If she can find a way to balance all those things — and that is a big ask — the race for second place in the first round on 10 April could be a three-way tie until the finishing line. It could be decided by just a handful of votes. If Pécresse has those votes, she could beat Macron two weeks later.

What would that change in France? Not much. Pécresse would bring a change of style. She would be marginally tougher than Macron on migration. She would be less ambitious about France’s role in Europe and Europe’s role in the world.

But the fundamentals would change little. The deep political divisions in France would persist; they might even deepen. The real battle for the soul of France is coming — but probably not until 2027.