French President Emmanuel Macron was up in the polls on Thursday after accusing his election rival Marine Le Pen of being a Russian puppet who would start a “civil war”.
Survey results published on Thursday, hours after a TV face-off, showed the incumbent head of state on 59 per cent of the vote, and his far-Right rival on 39 per cent, with 2 per cent abstentions.
A similar result on Sunday in the final round of the 2022 presidential election would see Mr Macron win his second five-year term of office.
The snap Elabe poll found Macron “more convincing” than Le Pen, after he said she was “in the grip of Russia” and using Moscow “as her banker”.
Headlines across France highlighted the sulphuric accusations, with Le Monde saying Le Pen had been “suffocated by an offensive Emmanuel Macron”.
In a scathing attack, the 44-year-old accused Le Pen, 53, of being unfit to replace him because she was still paying money back to Moscow following the invasion of Ukraine.
“War is raging on the continent,” said Mr Macron during the TV debate on Wednesday night, before saying to Ms Le Pen: “You are in fact in Russia’s grip.”
He said her National Rally party took out an £8million loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank in 2014, and was still paying it back.
Referring to his 2017 election campaign, when Mr Macron beat Ms Le Pen to win his first term of office, he said: “You are not just talking about Russia, but your banker. It’s hardly surprising that Russia took part in the campaign to destabilise me in 2017.”
In turn, Ms Le Pen said her party “had no other choice” but to take out the loan, because “French banks would not lend to us.”
Saying she was a “free and independent woman,” Ms Le Pen said: “I offer my solidarity and absolute compassion to the Ukrainian people in front of millions of viewers.”
Mr Macron also warned Ms Le Pen risked sparking a “civil war2 with her plans to ban Muslim women from wearing headscarf in public, and Jewish men from wearing the kippah.
Ms Le Pen replied: “I’m saying it very clearly – I think the headscarf is a uniform imposed by Islamists.”
Polls indicate that Mr Macron, a fiercely pro-EU centrist, has a strong lead of up to 10 per cent ahead of Sunday’s decisive vote.
But the gap is much narrower than in 2017, when Mr Macron beat Ms Le Pen with a landslide 66 per cent of the second round vote.
Mr Macron created En Marche ! (On the Move!) his own political movement in 2016, and is independent of any established party.
Ms Le Pen’s changed the name of her family party, the National Front, to National Rally in 2018, so as to try and soften its extremist image.
It was founded in 1972 by her father, the convicted racist and Holocaust denier, Jean-Marine Le Pen.
Whoever wins the election on Sunday will be President of France for the next five years.
