France: Political parties at a glance

Valérie Pécresse is running for the party Les Républicains (The Republicans), which embodies the French bourgeois right. For several decades, the Republicans, together with the Socialists, constituted one of the two major French political camps. However, this traditional spectrum was replaced by La République en marche in the last elections. Valérie Précesse is regional president of the Ile de France region, a politically important Parisian region, and gained experience in government under former President Nicolas Sarkozy. She is the first woman to run for the conservative Republicans and is campaigning for greater security.

Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement national (RN), the former Front National, is considered a promising candidate for the runoff. Le Pen has repeatedly been in second place in the polls. The daughter of the radical former party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, she has recently shown herself to be more moderate and has thus risen in the voters' favor. Marine Le Pen is a declared opponent of a multicultural society and sees it as having a damaging effect on the French economy.

La République en marche (LREM) is a party founded in 2016 by incumbent Emmanuel Macron and translates as "The Republic on the Move!". Its positions include liberality as well as European integration. Among other things, it advocates equality between men and women in the workplace and calls for extensive privatization for the public sector. One of Macron's goals is to overcome the division of the French political landscape into right and left. He describes his party's orientation as "progressivism."