I watched a French professor talk on Macron back in January...in basic terms, describing Macon as a ‘empty suit’. No one knows much of the guy...he has a six-line resume. Beyond three years as a finance minister, a couple of years as a big-time investment manager for the Rothschild Bank, and an audit manager...that’s it. He’s never run for office and been seen in the public eye.
He’s made two opposite end platform statements...(1) he wants to bring a huge number of new policemen for France (seen as a great positive). But then (2) he wants France to be an open door for immigration and that all migrants are a good thing for France. The general working-class French guy just doesn’t believe the second platform.
If you go to polls...Macron beats Le Pen by 10-points. If it’s Macron versus Fillon...then Macron beats him by three or four points. Fillon has one huge negative in the general public besides the fake pay situation for his wife over the last decade. He wants to terminate 500,000 government service jobs, and those folks (their families and friends included) aren’t happy with this position.
I would suggest one odd feature of this election. Le Pen has tuned up her public forum/argument skills to the ninth degree over the past year. Every argument that you draw her into...she resorts to what is best for the French people (not necessarily what’s best for the EU, or for immigration). This theme is very noticeable over the past two months if you watch interviews of her. Fillon has virtually no way of winning at this point. So it’s strictly a Le Pen versus Macron election as far as I can see.
Macron is toast after his many gaffes, eg when his says, in Algeria, that the French have committed a “crime against humanity” for the colonisation of Algeria. His popularity is only in the polls and in the talking circles.
Around me, the sentiment is the guy would sell his mother for a vote, I have seen no one condoning him for spitting on his own people.