Gird your loins for the first round of the 2022 French election this Sunday, which will decide the final two candidates to face-off for the presidency on 24 April. All signs are pointing to a two-horse race between President Macron and Marine Le Pen, who this week has reached her highest ever polling rates.

A Harris Interactive poll on Monday suggested Le Pen’s campaign had captured 48.5 per cent of voter intentions in an opinion poll of a likely second round runoff against Emmanuel Macron. Challenges, the business weekly which published the poll, added that Macron’s lead still ranged between 53-47 per cent and 58-42 per cent.

Emmanuel Macron versus the extreme right looks like it’s going to be a much closer call than in 2017.

One month ago, Macron announced his candidacy for a second term of Presidency. And everybody thought he was heading for a slam dunk. He had been riding a wave of success: after a miracle turnaround in vaccine take up, spurred by the mandatory health passes he introduced last summer, his approval rating spiked to the highest of any late-term president since Mitterrand. Indeed, he has polled consistently well for a year.

The two next most popular candidates were in hot water. Marine Le Pen of the National Rally (formerly the Front National) and Eric Zemmour of Reconquête – both historically avid admirers of Vladimir Putin – struggled to garner enough official signatures to mount their campaigns. In the last days before the deadline, which came in the second week of the invasion of Ukraine, they finally succeeded, but not before they had both denounced the Russian leader. ‘I think that what he has done is completely reprehensible. It changes, in part, the opinion I had of him,’ said Le Pen.

Meanwhile Macron has been taking Putin head on. The one western leader who had his ear. The one with the strongest rhetoric. As a sense of panic spread through Europe, his was a show of strength. His reputation as ‘Jupiter’ took on new meaning.

‘He has handled it very well indeed,’ the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Tatler. ‘Firm on principles. Leading on sanctions. Delivering arms to Ukraine. Lining up the EU, including Germany, behind France. And all the while never losing the thread of dialogue and diplomacy. For a head of state, that’s an impeccable combination.’ Lévy, who famously persuaded President Sarkozy to back the Libyan revolt, has been cautiously supportive of the Macron government. His book The Will to See details his time spent in war zones, including Ukraine, and encourages western society to open its eyes to atrocities elsewhere – and act.

Some have suggested Macron’s direct approach with Putin has helped him in his campaign for re-election. ‘Frankly, I have no idea,’ says Lévy. ‘It’s not the right question.’

It is a sombre moment to mount a campaign for re-election – triumphant messaging sits differently in times of war. Macron announced his with La République en Marche! on 3 April with an official letter distributed to the media in lieu of the rally he had reportedly planned in Marseille. Entitled Lettre aux Français, he positioned himself as the candidate who was ready to take on the greatest challenges of the century: one that would act for France and for Europe as one.

But the question du jour: where is President Macron? As the race to the ballot enters its final stages, he has been criticised this week for failing to attend televised debates with the other candidates. Marine Le Pen, on the other hand, has been debating with vigour – and taking every opportunity to discredit Macron for his absences.

‘The impression is not good; I’ll give you that,’ says Lévy. ‘But can you arm Ukraine, comfort Zelensky, spend hours on the phone listening to Putin rave, and do all the rest of his job as President amid these unprecedented storms, while also debating with candidates, some of whom have no other goal other than using the election as a springboard to their Warholian fifteen minutes of fame? I don’t know…’

France 2 journalists wrote a public letter to decry his lack of appearance on any public channel during his bid for re-election (he has appeared on privately-owned TF1). ‘Emmanuel Macron has entered the campaign very late, with dated arguments sullied by personal attacks on me. Clearly, he wants to avoid a debate,’ Le Pen told France Inter radio this week. Macron reportedly argues that no sitting French president has ever entered a television debate with other candidates. Then again, Macron is the only one in decades who has stood a likely chance of taking a second term.

He must also grapple with the McKinsey Affair, which has come to a head this week as a Senate inquiry committee revealed that state spending on consulting firms had skyrocketed during President Emmanuel Macron’s term in office. An official investigation was opened on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, experts are warning that Macron has underestimated his competition – and he seems to have cottoned on, cautioning a crowd of 30,000 at a Paris rally this week that Le Pen could pull off a Brexit-style victory. Le Pen is on a roll, haemorrhaging support from her closest rival, the ultra right wing former political pundit Eric Zemmour – and she’s using the momentum to reinvent her image. As little as three points behind Macron, Le Pen is now within his margin of error. If the polls are to be believed, she might scoop her party’s biggest victory since her father founded it in 1972.

All this is led by the veil of a refreshed strategy: she has pledged to increase the purchasing power of the less wealthy and to allow retirement from 60. She hasn’t, of course, shifted her party’s generations-old extreme views (she intends, for example to fine Muslim women wearing headscarves in public) but she has let them sink ever so slightly into the background.

It’s a clear attempt to shift her image from extreme right to centre right – but is it convincing? ‘The change is more apparent than real,’ says Lévy. ‘When Éric Zemmour set up his party [in 2021] and directly opposed her, she said, in substance, “That party is full of Nazis; I know, because before moving over to Zemmour, they were with me.” In other words, up until a few months ago, there were Nazis in her own entourage. If there has been any change, it must have been very recently indeed.’

Lévy reminds that history proves her ties to Putin are close. ‘Le Pen is like Trump. She has always admired Putin. She has always seen him as a defender of the Europe of nation states, conservative, in her mould. She chose her side in 2014, at the moment of the annexation of Crimea and the first dismantling of Ukraine. Moreover it was a Russian bank that extended her the loan that the French banks were refusing.’

Erik Emptaz of Le Canard Enchainé agrees. ‘By targeting Pécresse and Zemmour as priorities, [Macron] has taken his eye off Le Pen,’ he wrote in the latest edition. ‘She has taken advantage of this to ‘recentre’ herself. In styling herself as the competitor championing purchasing power, she has created a lot of smoke to hide her Putinophile past… [But] her agenda remains extremely right wing.’

Macron’s camp is reportedly baulking at an abstention rate predicted to be as high as 30 per cent. The same journal said that in a recent meeting, Macron’s team expressed concern that within that percentage there are reserve votes for Le Pen and Mélenchon (the left-wing La France Insoumise candidate, whose numbers are growing but do not yet seriously rival those of Le Pen and Macron), but not for La Republique en Marche!. ‘Campaigns count a lot less for those already sure they are going to vote,’ Céline Braconnier, political science professor, director of Sciences Po Saint-Germain and specialist in abstention, told Le Monde this week. ‘The last minute intensity has more sway among the voters most distanced from politics, the most uncertain and the most mistrusting. The absence of dynamic campaigning leaves these people on the fringes.’

To the point of abstention, Lévy responds bluntly: ‘Politics is discredited. Democracy is in crisis. Everywhere in the West. It’s terrible.’ But he is sure of the result. ‘Emmanuel Macron will win. Because the French people are wise. And, despite propaganda, traps, conspiracy theories, the alleged McKinsey Affair, and so on, we will not give ourselves to a candidate, Le Pen, who is both extremist and incompetent.’