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France will vote for its new president in April and although incumbent Emmanuel Macron is yet to officially announce his candidacy, his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is reported to be a critical factor in whether he can win a second term.
Macron hopes to be the first president since five-year terms were introduced in 2000 to be re-elected, though at least six leading candidates, plus many others who have declared an intention to run, will bid to replace him.
After two years of the COVID-19 crisis, and with the Omicron variant now at its peak, Macron's supporters fear his lead is under threat as the public tires of restrictions. As in the previous election, he will need to stave off the pull of the far-right, said The Connexion, a French news site.
Others bidding for the presidency include Valerie Pecresse, for the conservative Les Republicains, and the two far-right candidates Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour.
Recent Ifop surveys showed Macron is polling at about 25 percent of voting intentions, compared with 18 percent for Le Pen, 16 percent for Pecresse and 11.5 percent for Zemmour.
One French business leader that wants Macron to win the election in April told the Financial Times on Sunday that the public no longer supports COVID-19 social measures. "We are at the tipping point where people are now sick of restrictions. Things could go badly for him," they said. "They think the situation no longer merits the restrictions."
It was announced on Thursday that some novel coronavirus restrictions would be relaxed next month. But this is despite health ministry data showing that infections are still at more than 400,000 a day.
The Times reported that polling in the run up to April's vote suggests that "about three-quarters of voters back candidates on an arc starting in the center and ending on the far-right", with the left-wing and socialist parties falling behind. It said the combined ratings of all left-wing candidates amounted to just 23 percent of the national vote.
Luc Rouban, a political scientist at Sciences Po, told the Financial Times recently that there had been "a disintegration of French Socialism. But the other factor is the electorate," he said. He added that on immigration and law and order, "in the last 10 years, there has been a slide to the right".
The FT noted that a recent Ifop opinion poll showed public confidence in the government's ability to tackle the pandemic has slipped by nine percentage points to 41 percent since early December.
According to a Jan 12 poll from Ipsos, Macron's popularity has dropped by four points since November, with 40 percent approving of his record.
The Guardian said Macron had also been "ramping up his rhetoric against France's minority of nonvaccinated people - less than 10 percent of the population - in part as a way of setting the political battle lines for the election".
Vincent Martigny, politics professor at the University of Nice, told the FT that Macron's election chances "will depend on how people react to Omicron and on whether the government changes the protocols for dealing with the pandemic. If they continue with very restrictive policies, it might hit them in the end".