A poll has revealed that in a second-round run-off of the 2022 French presidential elections, populist candidate Marine Le Pen would defeat nearly all of the proposed left-wing candidates.
Released on Sunday the poll, conducted by the polling firm Ifop, revealed that the leader of the National Rally (RN) would soundly defeat several left-wing candidates such as far-left Jean-Luc Melenchon who would only score 40 per cent of the vote if facing Ms Le Pen.
Environmentalist candidate Yannick Jadot would also lose to the populist party leader, while left-wing mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo scored even at 50 per cent when compared to Le Pen, Europe1 reports.
The strongest candidate against Le Pen in the poll was centre-right prospective candidate Xavier Bertrand who saw 59 per cent, compared to Le Pen’s 41 per cent, while current French President Emmanuel Macron saw 55 per cent in the polling.
While the poll examined a variety of possible match-ups for the second round, it also revealed that Le Pen and Macron are the most likely to advance to the second round and face each other in a repeat of the presidential second round in the elections of 2017.
Christophe Castaner, former French interior Minister under President Macron, has also called on the French left to stop targeting Macron as their chief opponent and argued that the current president was the best candidate to defeat Le Pen.
“The whole left still considers that his opponent is Macron and not Le Pen,” Castaner said over the weekend in reaction to the Ifop poll and added, “None of the left-wing candidates in the second round, according to the polls, are capable of beating Marine Le Pen. Emmanuel Macron is.”
“She has only one ambition, to want power at all costs, even if she has to give up everything in order to have power,” Castaner said of the National Rally leader.
The new poll comes after a number of other polls in recent weeks and months that have shown a tight race between Le Pen and Macron in both the first and second rounds of next year’s elections.
Former French minister Arnaud Montebourg, who served under former President Francois Hollande, has claimed that Macron is not the candidate to beat Le Pen and that he could likely lose to Le Pen due to the public perception that he represented the “oligarchy.”