Emmanuel Macron’s second-round campaign strategy is markedly different from the approach he took ahead of his first presidential election duel against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in 2017, as he criss-crosses the country – often visiting hostile terrain – as he tries to banish a perception of haughtiness among parts of the electorate.
French presidential election © France 24
Macron went straight to northern France the day after the April 10 first round, which catapulted him into another rematch against National Rally (Rassemblement National or RN) leader Marine Le Pen. The trip saw the incumbent president meeting voters in Le Pen’s heartland, the economically depressed ex-mining towns of the Hauts-de-France region stretching from the Paris outskirts to the English Channel.
The following day Macron visited similarly difficult territory – talking to angry voters in Strasbourg and Mulhouse, cities near the German border where hard-left populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon carried the first-round vote. On Saturday, he hosts a rally in Marseille, France’s troubled second city, where Mélenchon enjoyed a big lead.
Macron is expected to hold two more rallies before the campaign is over, while Le Pen will speak in Arras in her northern fiefdom on April 21, exactly a week after she spoke to a crowd of 4,000 in the historic southeastern city Avignon.
The president has learned his lesson from last time. Although most observers accurately foresaw a Macron landslide against Le Pen, the far-right candidate narrowed his polling lead in the early stages by shaking as many hands as possible on the ground – while Macron celebrated topping the first-round polls with a dinner at La Rotonde, one of Paris’s most renowned upscale restaurants.
‘Close to the people’After staying aloof for months while his rivals were campaigning for the first round, Macron is now keen to be palpably “close to the people”, noted Pierre-Emmanuel Guigo, a historian and expert in political communication at Paris-Est Créteil University.
This is all the more important because Macron is no longer the fresh-faced upstart, but an incumbent whom part of the electorate perceives as arrogant and disdainful, Guigo added.
