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Sunday, April 30, 2017

Marine Le Pen gaining on Emmanuel Macron in French election polls

The centrist favourite to win the French presidency is losing his lead over his far-right rival with just a week to go until the vote.

Emmanuel Macron's lead over Marine Le Pen has slipped six points since polls conducted just before the first round last Sunday.

However, he is still as much as 20 points ahead.

According to pollster Harris Interactive, who correctly predicted the result of the first round with remarkable accuracy, Mr Macron now has a lead of 61% against Ms Le Pen's 39%.

:: Marine Le Pen: Who is National Front candidate in France election?

That compares to a poll carried out under the same conditions just before last Sunday's vote which put Mr Macron at 67% and Ms Le Pen at 33%.

Importantly, the most recent Harris poll was conducted before Ms Le Pen announced an alliance with the defeated first round presidential candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.

Mr Dupont-Aignan was sixth in the first round contest, securing 4.7% of the vote.

His party, Debout La France (Stand Up France), is an off-shoot of the conservative right. The alliance will be seen by some right-wing voters as attractive.

Ms Le Pen has said that Mr Dupont-Aignan would become her prime minister.

He once claimed he could never form an alliance with the far-right.

:: French presidential election: Who is Emmanuel Macron?

His policies are less extreme than hers, though he is deeply eurosceptic and a longstanding critic of the eurozone.

The newly formed duo released a joint statement on Saturday alongside a modified manifesto.

Within it, some of Ms Le Pen's campaign pledges seem to have become more ambiguous.

There is no explicit mention of her promise to quit the single currency, and only a looser reference to ditching French membership of the EU.

Sections of the French media are claiming it represents an important u-turn designed to lure more voters.

Elderly right-wing voters had been particularly concerned about the pledge to quit the eurozone because of the effect it could have on their savings.

The two candidates have spent the weekend campaigning in different parts of the country.

Ms Le Pen was in the south of France on Sunday with a particular campaign message on the environment - a key issue for the now defeated far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon.

It's possible that far-right Ms Le Pen could, curiously, attract a proportion of far-left voters because despite their opposing views on immigration, Mr Melenchon and Ms Le Pen share some anti-establishment and anti-globalisation visions.

Ms Le Pen and her campaign team claim Mr Macron represents a bubble that will burst at the first national crisis.

He is, they say, representative of the globalist, borderless elite of politicians and financiers who have no interest in looking after real people.

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