Emmanuel Macron outclassed Marine Le Pen on technical detail and grasp of policy in their only TV debate. But it is unlikely that the event will shift voting intentions much
, were out chasing the votes of those who picked neither of them in the first round. The biggest chunk of these are the 7.7m people who backed Mr Mélenchon, many of them young and green-minded. Conscious of this, Mr Macron vowed in Marseille to put the environment “at the heart” of a second term, to double the pace of France’s effort to reduce carbon emissions, and to make France the first big country to end the use of fossil fuels.
Though brought up in a mansion outside Paris, Ms Le Pen has successfully styled herself as a defender of “the people” against the Paris elite, embodied by a “globalist” president; and as a single mother who has struggled like anyone else. She has steered clear of the capital and criss-crossed rural France, where her vote is strongest, promising to cut VAT on heating bills, petrol and food.
For her part, Ms Le Pen was a calmer figure than when she debated Mr Macron in 2017, offering plenty of feel-your-pain empathy for those struggling to get by, and waiting for condescension to get the better of Mr Macron, which at times it did. The pair clashed over wind turbines , the legal retirement age and her proposed ban of the Muslim headscarf in public . Such a ban, Mr Macron declared, would “start a civil war”.
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