French Voters Prepare for First Round of Presidential Elections Amid Surge in Right-Wing Nationalism

French voters head to the polls this weekend for the first round of what’s being called the country’s most unpredictable presidential election in decades — a contest unfolding under heightened security just days after a gunman opened fire on police along Paris’s famed Champs-Élysées, killing one officer.

An Eleven-Candidate Field, and a System Under Strain

Eleven candidates are competing in Sunday’s first-round vote, though polling has narrowed the realistic contenders for the two runoff spots to four: Emmanuel Macron, the 39-year-old former economy minister running as a political outsider under his newly formed centrist movement En Marche!; Marine Le Pen, leader of the nationalist, far-right National Front; François Fillon, the conservative candidate for the traditional center-right Republicans party, whose campaign has been dogged by a fraud investigation into payments to his wife; and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a hard-left candidate who has surged in the campaign’s final weeks.

What makes this election genuinely unusual, according to a House of Commons Library briefing on the race, is the real possibility that neither of France’s two traditionally dominant parties — the center-right Republicans and the center-left Socialists — will make it to the runoff at all, something that has not happened since the founding of France’s Fifth Republic in 1958. Socialist President François Hollande, deeply unpopular after a single term, declined to even seek re-election, leaving his party’s candidate, Benoit Hamon, polling in the single digits.

Le Pen’s National Front Rides a Global Wave

Marine Le Pen’s strong standing heading into Sunday’s vote reflects a broader nationalist and populist current that has reshaped politics across the Western world over the preceding two years, from the UK’s vote to leave the European Union to Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president. Le Pen has spent years working to soften the National Front’s public image, distancing the party from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s more openly extremist history, while retaining its core platform of reduced immigration, skepticism toward the European Union, and calls for a referendum on French membership in the EU altogether, according to EveryCRSReport’s analysis prepared for the U.S. Congress ahead of the vote.

That platform carries real implications beyond France’s borders. Analysts note Le Pen’s foreign policy instincts — skepticism of NATO, distance from the EU, a broadly nationalist orientation — bear some resemblance to positions associated with the Trump administration, even as her rival Macron has been openly critical of Trump and has positioned himself as a committed defender of the European project Le Pen wants to unwind.

A Campaign Overshadowed by Violence

The attack on the Champs-Élysées, which struck just three days before the vote, added a fraught, tense backdrop to the campaign’s final stretch. Authorities have treated the shooting as an act of terrorism, and its timing — so close to the first round — has fed into broader campaign debates over security and immigration that have run through nearly every candidate’s platform in one form or another, whether framed as a call for tougher enforcement or, from candidates further to the left, as a rejection of using isolated violence to justify sweeping policy changes.

What Sunday’s Vote Will Decide

Under France’s two-round electoral system, if no candidate secures an outright majority Sunday — a near-certainty given the fractured, eleven-candidate field — the top two finishers will advance to a runoff on May 7, regardless of party affiliation. That structure means Sunday’s results will not determine France’s next president outright, but they will determine which two competing visions for the country’s future — and, by extension, for the European Union’s future — voters will ultimately choose between just two weeks later.

For related coverage of nationalist political movements, see our piece on economic crisis and nationwide protest in Zimbabwe, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.