While the second round of the presidential election takes place in a few days, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the two finalists, are preparing for the debate between the two rounds of April 20 in the evening. A debate that the RN candidate has prepared well, so as not to reproduce her wobbly performance in 2017.
It was an insurmountable obstacle for Marine Le Pen. The debate between the two rounds of May 3, 2017 which opposed the leader of the RN to Emmanuel Macron marked the spirits. The performance of the candidate, halftone, cost her dearly, contributing to discrediting her political project, if not her party, at the time of the vote in the second round of 2017. Her lack of preparation and her feverishness, the candidate recognized them on several occasions, in particular on the set of BFMTV on March 22, 2022, in the middle of the campaign. When asked if she felt ready for a new confrontation with Emmanuel Macron, she recognized. “I got the strategy wrong” in 2017. “I’ve worked a lot over the past five years, I’m ready,” she added. It must be said that several sequences surprised viewers during this first debate, starting with the one where Marine Le Pen, curiously, attempted a reference to a sketch of the Unknowns on the “invaders”.
In video: “The invaders”, highlight of the first Macron – Le Pen debate
This time, the Macron Le Pen confrontation is different. After crossing the bar of the first round by finishing in second position with 23.15% of the vote, Marine Le Pen intends to thwart the forecasts and the polls, which give her for the moment losing against the outgoing president, with a duel that will announcement, however, much tighter. In fact, the voting intentions for the representative of the RN this year revolve around 43 to 47%, much more than the 33.90% she had collected in the second round of 2017. She is favored by her years of politics, which place her as a popular figure in France. Above all, she faces an LREM candidate in difficulty in the face of his record and the attacks which castigate his “non-campaign”.
This image of a candidate reinforced by her experience and more politically mature, Marine Le Pen often claimed it during this 2022 campaign. Competing for the third time for the supreme title, the leader of the far right sought to ” de-demonize” by moderating his positions and making statements that are less clear-cut than those of his party’s traditional line. A communication exercise that she mastered throughout the campaign, in particular by opposing the Ministry of Remigration, a proposal by Eric Zemmour, even more on the far right than her, or by going back on her ambition to ban the wearing of the veil (explained in the law “aimed at combating Islamist ideologies“ presented by the MP for Pas-de-Calais in January 2021) by being very hesitant on the subject, in particular when she was questioned about her measurement during a trip to Calvados in mid-April.
The between-two-rounds debate of April 20, 2022
Marine Le Pen has made a point of preparing for this debate in all conscience, even taking a two-day break on April 19 and 20, even though the second round takes place on Sunday April 24 and the campaign officially ends on Friday evening April 22. She stayed to prepare in her Paris office, with her closest collaborators. On the far right, everyone understands the stakes of this ultimate confrontation which will probably be followed by millions of French people (in 2017, it was 16 million viewers). For Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, who joined Reconquête!, Eric Zemmour’s party, in March, before becoming its vice-president, “Marine Le Pen can still win”, as she affirmed it at the microphone of BFMTV. Assuring that she “hoped” that this victory would materialize, she said she was confident: “This is the reason why I personally called to vote for her, including Eric Zemmour”. A few hours before the debate between the two rounds, she was also optimistic about her aunt’s ability to stand up to the outgoing president: “I don’t think she’s arriving in the same conditions, with the same experience. I believe that she has still learned from her mistakes, undeniably. I do not expect at all that there will be a spectacular difference tonight. I think that on the contrary, she will be able to regain control and probably to be better prepared than last time and also less tired than she was at the end of the campaign”. The same goes for Louis Aliot, the mayor of Perpignan who supports the candidate and who believes that embodying this presidential function should be easier this time: “She is preparing for it, she has the experience now, she has a lot worked, she masters the subjects” (comments made on April 19 on France 2).
A point of view shared by the closest adviser to the RN candidate, namely Jordan Bardella, the acting president of the party during this campaign. On the set of France 2 on April 20 in the morning, and as the debate began the same evening, he conceded “apprehension” before the debate between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, explaining: “There is no no stress but there is a form of apprehension, because we know that many French people will decide on this debate and that it will not be the same debate as five years ago (…) Maybe the mistake we made in 2017 was to want to show the French too much the brutality of Emmanuel Macron’s project.Tonight, I can assure you, she will talk a lot about herself and the vision she has for the country, not for the next five years but for the next fifty years”, he developed. The journalists then asked him if the debate would be less aggressive than in 2017, when the peaks had rocketed between the two candidates. “The idea is to have a serene and peaceful debate,” he replied. “Me, I deplore that since the beginning of this campaign we have been the target of anathemas, caricatures (…) Me, I want to say to the French people perhaps one thing before this evening: “Don’t listen to the merchants of fear , do not be fooled by caricatures. Listen to what Marine Le Pen is going to tell you this evening and choose in your soul and conscience”, he concluded, thus showing himself rather confident about the ability of the far-right leader to make the polls lie, which give it for the moment behind the outgoing president.
“Tears Uncontainable”
The debate between the two rounds of the 2017 presidential election will go down in the history of the National Front as a political earthquake with catastrophic effects, pushing the party to the brink of implosion. For Marine Le Pen, these two hours of face-to-face meetings also constitute a decisive moment in her political career: it is this moment that will have caused her to lose, in the eyes of many FN executives and activists, part of her credibility. as a presidential leader, capable of getting the National Front one day to the Elysée. And obviously, the president of the far-right party is still having a hard time recovering. Valeurs Actuelles also echoes the moods of the woman who still holds the helm of a party in full recovery.
In a report devoted to him, theweekly reveals that Marine Le Pen was very affected, personally, even evoking “tears impossible to contain at times, in the days that followed” this debate. “We made a strategic mistake by choosing the offensive. While Macron had been much criticized for his ’emptiness’, we wanted to make a criticism of the ‘full’, that is to say of his action if he was elected. It appeared aggressive, when people expected less content and more image”, she analyzes today with journalists from Valeurs Actuelles. And to consider that it has certainly not been up to the exercise “on the form”: “I do not deny anything on the merits, everyone can see today that I was right, but I did not meet the expectations on the forms. I am deeply saddened for those who were disappointed. It is also a lesson”.
The failure of Le Pen, because of Philippot?
However, Marine le Pen does not seem to resign. Indicating that she was not in “optimal form” that day, she puts her failure into perspective: “It is always easy to judge mistakes after the fact, but I have surely made some. No one is infallible” , she says again. Moreover, the president of the FN does not seem to worry excessively about the situation of her party, and even seems to be delighted that the departure of Florian Philippot calms things down within the party. She even now admits that without this, “the refoundation congress would have turned into a bloodbath, a nightmare” and that her former right-hand man would have “played the tension”. Better still, the president of the National Front will be able to rely on the renewed support of all those who were exasperated by the “Philippot line”. And take advantage of a new exegesis of the disaster between the two rounds of the presidential election: and if in the end, the fault fell to the fallen former vice-president? This is what some FN executives have in mind. One of them even told The Obs that through his fault, a call from Marine Le Pen to the voters of François Fillon, the dryly beaten LR candidate, never saw the light of day. “This is the major political error of the in-between rounds”, assures a lieutenant of Marine Le Pen to the weekly. Marine Le Pen would have thought of a video, but its distribution would have been prevented by Florian Philippot, who would have “redacted” it, convinced that it was necessary to speak “only to the voters of Mélenchon”…