Le Pen Sees Poll Ratings Rise Again, Increasing Lead Over Other Candidates for President After Collapsing Macron Government Getty Images

Marine Le Pen’s populists pulled the plug on French President Emmanuel Macron’s precarious attempt at governing last week and appear to have enjoyed a bump in their polling since.

Polling for French broadsheet newspaper Le Figaro and Sud Radio finds Marine Le Pen has lengthened her lead over all other competitors for the French Presidential elections. Recent drama over the collapse of the French government and even Le Pen’s corruption court case has failed to put a dent in her rising popularity, it found.

While the next vote is not required by law until Spring 2027, France is lurching from one crisis to the next and appears to be entering into a defacto state of constitutional crisis, and whether incumbent President Macron will go his full term is a matter of intense discussion domestically.

The new government Macron formed to perform the day-to-day running of the state beneath him earlier this year collapsed last week after just three months in power, a record for modern French history. The centrist-led government had been propped up by Marine Le Pen’s pro-border control faction but apparently got too cocky, reckoning she wouldn’t risk a gamble on her own poll ratings by being seen to be the one to bring it down, but in the end a tax-hiking budget was too much and she pulled the pin.

Yet the idea the French public would blame Le Pen for Emmanuel Macron’s inability to win votes or form a stable government appears to have been in error. Earlier polling has already shown the public overwhelmingly blames President Macron, and even the outgoing Prime Minister he’d picked to try and carry the matter seems to have got off scott-free and blameless in the eyes of the public.

Le Figaro finds compared to the last time the poll was run in September, Le Pen has risen by two or three points in the wake of the drama in Paris, putting her 11 points clear of the next-closest competitor to be the next President of France. The paper noted this was “Despite the vote of the motion of censure” — revealing again this underlying assumption in France that collapsing Emmanuel Macron’s government last week would damage Le Pen and her National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN) party rather than endear them further to voters.

The publication noted Le Pen “is almost at the level of François Mitterrand in 1974”, an election he won by a close margin.

Because it is not clear who the various parties would put forward as their candidate for a theoretical snap election for the office of President, French opinion polls can tend to test several different scenarios, each with a dozen or more candidates. With the anti-mass migration RN, for instance, it is conceivable that either Le Pen — who has contested and lost the past three French Presidential elections — or her rising-star deputy Jordan Bardella could do the job.

As many as eight left-wing politicians running the gamut of political parties from social democrats to full-on communists are potentials, and a handful of them are likely to actually make it onto the ballot.

Nevertheless, the Le Figaro polling shows there is no combination of leaders from any party that could step RN from coming first place in this election. In her best-case scenario Le Pen takes 38 points against Gabriel Attal’s 20, who would stand in Emmanuel Macron’s place because of the two-term limit. Le Pen would also win against centrist-right former French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe with an 11-point-lead.

Yet none of this would guarantee a Le Pen in the Elysée Palace. France has a two-stage election process, with many candidates entering the first round and most lowest-scoring eliminated before a second round of the strongest performers. It’s a system designed to keep out outsiders — as the second round allows tactical coalitions of all legacy French parties against one undesirable newcomer — and which can create extremely disproportionate results.

The perfect illustration of this system working as intended was this year’s snap national election, called by Macron to buttress his own power but which spectacularly backfired, which saw Le Pen’s RN come first place in the number of votes cast, yet third place in actual number of seats won. This could apply to the Presidential election too, but was last actually achieved in the 1990s.

Yet for now, the questions over whether Marine Le Pen being taken to court over European Union embezzlement allegations and the weakness of French government could seriously impact her polling ratings may have been settled.

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