On April 10, the French general election will usher in the first round of voting, and if no candidates receive more than half of the votes, the two candidates with the leading vote will enter the decisive round two weeks later. Today, incumbent President Macron's popular support leads the run. Including Macron, there are 12 candidates in this French presidential election, and Macron's opponents are mainly these five people.
Marina Le Pen is the leader of France's far-right national coalition, and just after the 2020 New Year, she announced her intention to participate in the 2022 presidential election. This is her third presidential campaign, after running for the presidency for the first time in 2012, finishing third in the first round of voting and failing to make it to the decider round; in 2017, she entered the second round with Macron and eventually lost.
Marine Le Pen, 53, comes from a political family and is the daughter of Le Pen Sr. le Pen, a veteran far-right politician in France and the leader of the National Front, the predecessor of the National Union. As a child, Marina Le Pen accompanied her father to attend meetings, marches, and help campaigns.
Marina Le Pen joined the National Front in 1986 at the age of 18. While studying law at the University of Paris II, she participated in student movements influenced by far-right ideologies, then worked as a lawyer for five years, took charge of the legal affairs of the National Front in 1998, was elected a member of the local council of Calais in northern France in the same year, and became the executive vice-president of the National Front in 2003. In 2004, she was elected to the Paris Regional Parliament and then to the European Parliament. In 2011, the 82-year-old Le Pen announced his resignation as president of the National Front, with Marina Le Pen taking over as party leader.
When Le Pen founded the National Front in the 1970s, far-right parties were still very unpopular in Europe, but as the political landscape has evolved in recent years, the "National Alliance", renamed in 2018, has become a very influential party in French politics. This is inextricably linked to Marina Le Pen's long-standing packaging strategy of "de-demonizing": after taking over the leadership of the National Front, she tried to "whitewash" the far-right party, reach out to economically vulnerable people, attract young people, and "soften" the party image. In 2015, marina Le Pen also expelled her father from the party for frequent anti-Semitic remarks by the elder Le Pen, and the father-daughter relationship broke down. The results are clear, the far-right party moved from the fringes to the center of the French political scene, with Marina Le Pen winning more than 6.9 million votes in the first round of the presidential election in 2017, setting a record for the National Front in the election.
Marina Le Pen's advocacy is in line with her father's, anti-immigrant, anti-globalization, anti-EUROPEAN Union, and also advocates withdrawal from NATO, advocating trade protectionism, and has been called "france's most dangerous woman". Previously, she had expressed her admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, but as the situation in Russia and Ukraine escalated, she changed her attitude toward Russia, but at the same time warned that sanctions against Russia could damage the French economy.
Today, she is no longer the only exponent of France's far-right political power, and zemoor, the columnist Zemmer, who made his mark this year, has taken some of her votes and poached some of her staff, including Marina Le Pen's nephew. But Marina Le Pen remains competitive, with a poll released by Ipsos on April 2 showing that Macron and Marina Le Pen had 26% and 21% support in the first round of voting, respectively. Perhaps after April 10, Macron and Marina Le Pen will repeat the decisive battle scene from the last election.
Valerie PecresThere are also two candidates who intend to attack the title of France's first female president. One of them is Valerie Pécrés, the Republican candidate of France's traditional center-right party. Whether or not she makes the tiebreaker round, she has already made history — the first female presidential candidate in Republican history. "For the first time in history, the parties of General de Gaulle, Pompidou, Chirac and Sarkozy had a female candidate." After being elected Republican presidential candidate, Pecrece said with a smile, "Today, I think of all women. ”
The 55-year-old politician, who describes herself as "one-third like Thatcher and two-thirds like Merkel," is politically experienced and speaks Russian. She taught at Sciences Po and served as an adviser to former French President Jacques Chirac before being elected to Parliament in 2002 and re-elected in 2007. Pecrés once blew herself up when she first entered politics and was not sociable, and it was Chirac who taught her not to be shy and not to be afraid of the veneer.
In those years, France's center-right was gaining momentum, and Sarkozy, who was elected president in 2007, came from the Union of popular movements, a center-right party in France, the predecessor of the Republican Party. After Sarkozy became president, Pekerez entered the cabinet and successively served as Minister of Higher Education and Research, Minister of Budget and Government Spokesperson.
In 2012, Sarkozy ran for re-election but lost to Hollande, a center-left socialist. Since then, Republicans have lost consecutive general elections, but Pécrés has been prominent in local elections, twice elected president of the Ile-de-France regional council in 2015 and 2021. It is said that in order to win the presidency of the Ile de France Regional Council, Pecres personally swept the streets to show his determination to rectify the sanitation. It was with his brilliant performance at a low ebb of center-right power that on December 4 last year, Pekeres defeated four other male party opponents with 60.95% of the vote to win the Republican primary, representing the party in the French presidency.
Pecrés' political advocacy includes strengthening France's internal security, controlling immigration, defending the liberal line in the economy, pro-business and pro-EU, and some analysts believe that she has also absorbed far-right views such as anti-immigrants. However, her moderate views coincide with Macron's in some respects. Marina Le Pen said Pécris's platform was almost a replica of Macron's and "regretted for Republican voters." It also reflects the awkward situation of France's center-right parties, who are all too vulnerable to being split between the far-right or "neither left nor right" Macron.
Anne HidalgoIn addition to the far-right and center-right, France's traditional center-left socialist party, has also launched a female candidate, the current mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. She is 63 years old, nominated by the Socialist Party as a presidential candidate last October, and a woman who has created the "first" French woman to enter politics: in 2014 she became the first female mayor in the history of Paris.
Hidalgo was a Spanish immigrant whose family moved from Spain to the large city of Lyon in central France at the age of two. Later, her parents returned to Spain, and Hidalgo stayed in Lyon to study. In 1973, at the age of 14, Hidalgo became French, but from 2003 she re-retained dual French and Spanish citizenship.
Hidalgo joined the Socialist Party in 1994 and served several times as a cabinet minister adviser from 1997 to 2002. In 2001, Hidalgo was elected First Deputy Mayor of Paris, then the Socialist Draenouille; in 2008, both she and Draenouille were re-elected.
After Hollande's election as President of France in 2012, Hidalgo had the chance to enter the cabinet, but she politely declined, focusing on running for mayor of Paris. In the 2014 French local municipal elections, she received strong support from Draenauer, was successfully elected, and was re-elected in 2020. She has been enriched by the resume of the mayor of Paris, who has led Paris through crises and upheavals such as the 2015 series of terrorist attacks, the "Yellow Vest" demonstrations and the Notre Dame fire. Former French President Jacques Chirac served as mayor of Paris for 18 years, an experience that laid the foundation for his political career.
Last year, Hidalgo chose to announce his candidacy for president in Rouen rather than Paris. Rouen's port reminds her of her father, who worked in a shipyard and as a tailor, and aspired to become "the first female president in French history," she said. Hidalgo comes from a family of Hispanic workers and is a big selling point for her votes. But today, when France's center-left power is weakening, her poll support rate does not exceed 3%, and this year is destined to "accompany the run".
Jean-Luc MélangeAfter the three women generals, let's talk about Mélang-hsiung, the candidate for the left-wing party "Unyielding France", which has a support rate second only to Macron and Marina Le Pen. The 71-year-old is the oldest candidate in this French election, his third and most likely last presidential campaign.
Mélang-ště was the strongest figure on the Left in France, but his approval rating in the April 2 poll was just 15.5 percent. He is an old face in French politics, giving up teaching and journalism in the 1970s to start politics, joining the Socialist Party at the age of 26 and being elected to the Senate at the age of 35, the youngest senator in France. He was a senator for 20 years and held a number of government positions, such as Secretary of State and Minister of Vocational Education in the cabinet of former French Socialist Prime Minister Jospan.
Later, Méron-hsiung was disappointed by the socialist party's growing rightward drift, so he quit the Socialist Party in 2008 and participated in the establishment of the Left Party, becoming the leader of the Left Front. The Left Front was formed for the 2009 European Parliament elections, when Mérancheon was elected to the European Parliament. In 2012, he represented the Left Front in the French presidential election against the center-right Sarkozy and socialist Hollande, and Méranche failed to make it to the second round. In 2016, Méranzion founded the left-wing political party "Indomitable France" and served as its chairman, supported by forces such as the Left Party. In 2017, he ran for the presidency for the second time, but still fell into the first round of voting, ranking fourth in the vote.
Although he never made it to the decider, Melanthun's eloquence and appeal were impressive. He also excels at shaping his brand image, always at the forefront of trends, and uses modern technologies such as social media and holographic projection to promote canvassing. He has more than 2 million followers on social media "Twitter", and at the 2017 campaign launch, Méronjuv also used 3D holographic projection technology to make himself appear at political rallies in six election centers at the same time.
This year, Mellon offered some very different views from Macron, such as a promise to lower the retirement age by two years to 60, and Macron is ready to continue to raise the retirement age. Méronschon also said he would raise taxes on the wealthy and improve labor treatment. In addition, he advocated withdrawing from NATO and making France a "neutral country", which he considered an insult to France's subordination to the United States.
Eric ZemourThere is another candidate, although the support rate is not high, but once a hit in the election competition, he is the "Recover the Lost Land" party candidate, known as the "French version of Trump" Zemoor. Zemour is a complete "political savvy" with little political experience, having never held public office before announcing his candidacy for president this year, but he has risen rapidly by trumpeting extreme claims such as anti-immigration and populism in the media, and the poll support once surpassed that of Marina Le Pen.
Zemur, 64 years old, a graduate of the Sciences Po, has worked as a reporter, editor and commentator in the French "Paris Daily", Le Figaro and other media, for many years to write political columns for newspapers, or best-selling authors, TV hosts, in the TV station to do current political program ratings are not low.
Zemoul, who has long worked with the media, knows how to stir up popular sentiment, make complex theories sound easy to understand, and combine his erudition and populist ideas into highly communicative speeches. He will also make full use of history, describing history with a touch of nostalgia, in order to consolidate the impression that France was "once glorious and now in decline", thus paving the way for its campaign slogan of "returning France to glory".
The issue of immigration is the subject of Zemour's campaign, advocating a fight against illegal immigration and even arguing that immigrants are engaged in a "counter-conquest" campaign against France. In 2018, he was convicted of incitement to racial discrimination. For most voters who support far-right forces, It is likely that Marina Le Pen is still the most likely candidate.