Sawt Falasteen - Le Pen, Macron clash in debate ahead of French election

France faces a stark choice in Sunday's second-round run-off between the centrist president Macron and the anti-immigration Le Pen, who will seek to become the country's first far-right head of state in an outcome that would send shockwaves around Europe.

Macron and Le Pen, who exchanged a brief handshake before the debate, sat face-to-face at two individual tables separated by just a handful of metres.

The opening exchanges of the debate -- expected to last almost three hours -- were dominated by daily concerns such as the rising cost of living, which Le Pen has made a major feature of her campaign.

Le Pen said she had seen people "suffering" over the first five years of Macron's rule and that "another choice is possible".

"If the French people honour me with their confidence on Sunday, I will be a president for daily life, the value of work and purchasing power," she said.

Macron replied that "we must and should improve people's daily lives through major projects for the school and health systems".

He claimed his measures to help household incomes were more effective than Le Pen's and also said that France should become a "great ecological power of the 21st century".

- Tighter race -

Macron is favourite to win the run-off, with most polls showing an advantage of over 10 percent, and become the first French president to win a second term since Jacques Chirac in 2002.

The latest poll by Ipsos/Sopra Steria published Wednesday predicted a solid margin of victory for Macron on 56 percent to 44 for Le Pen.

But analysts and allies of the president have warned the result is far from a foregone conclusion, with polls indicating over 10 percent of French who intend to cast their ballots have yet to decide who to vote for.

An Odoxa poll released Wednesday found that Macron's approval rating as a "good president" had slumped to just 40 percent in mid-April, down six points from March.

"This debate will probably be decisive for giving an advantage to one of these two rivals," said Odoxa's president Gael Sliman.

Brice Teinturier, director general of Ipsos France, said that while in the past presidential debates had become more of a tradition than decisive this one "could move more votes than we have ever observed before" in modern France.

The almost three-hour debate is a rematch of their 2017 face-off that was widely seen as disastrous for Le Pen and contributing to Macron's easy eventual victory with over 66 percent of the vote.

This time, the scenario is different in a far tighter race.

Macron is no longer an upstart but the incumbent president with a five-year record to defend while Le Pen has sought to soften her image and present her far-right party as a mainstream force.

Both candidates have their eyes on voters who backed third-placed hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon in the first round. He has refused to urge his supporters to vote for Macron in order to keep Le Pen out of the Elysee Palace.

Looking ahead to parliamentary elections in June, often deemed the "third round" in France's electoral system, Melenchon on Tuesday called for a left-wing alliance that would deny either Macron or Le Pen a majority and potentially set him up as prime minister.

- Zelensky weighs in -

Macron will likely seek to portray Le Pen as a fringe politician who cannot be trusted on foreign policy -- especially after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, given her past support for President Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky entered the French debate Wednesday by urging Le Pen to admit "she made a mistake" in her past admiration for Putin and her refusal to condemn his 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Even jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny also waded in to the fray with a long Twitter thread from his prison camp urging the French to vote for Macron.

He accused Le Pen of "corruption" and "selling political influence to Putin" over a 2014 loan of nine million euros ($10 million) from a Czech-Russian bank he described as "Putin's notorious money-laundering outfit".

Macron is also likely to target Le Pen's plans for limiting the economic impact of the Ukraine war for low-income households, and her promise to give "national priority" to French citizens for jobs or welfare benefits.

For her part, the far-right leader will zero in on Macron's proposal to push back the retirement age from 62 currently -- though in recent days he has wavered on whether it should be 65 or 64.

B.Mahmoud--SF-PST