Polls Predict a Macron Win, but World Leaders Are Still Nervous

Welcome to today’s Morning Brief, where we’re looking at France’s presidential election, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and more news worth following from around the world.

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By Sunday evening, the world will know whether France has elected its first female leader or its first two-term president since Jacques Chirac.

It’s looking like incumbent Emmanuel Macron is headed for victory; he holds a 10-point average lead in polls over his challenger, the far-right Marine Le Pen. That she is still within range of Macron, who trounced her by 30 percentage points in 2017, has Western capitals nervous that the French could swap an ardent European Union supporter for one closer to Moscow than Brussels.

Is it closer than it seems? Undecided voters are one concern, with as many as 11 percent still yet to make up their minds.

Supporters of the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon are another wild card. The worry for Macron is not so much that they would go over to Le Pen but that they simply won’t vote at all. Just under half of his first round voters don’t intend to cast a ballot on Sunday, but two-thirds of those who plan to vote say they’ll back Macron.

Michele Barbero, in a Paris dispatch for Foreign Policy, spoke with one Mélenchon supporter who isn’t sure whether to vote on Sunday. “I feel disillusioned, desperate, and I have less and less confidence in politics to bring about more social justice,” she said.

The end for Le Pen? As the election of U.S. President Joe Biden in 2020 showed, a victory for a centrist candidate doesn’t magically depolarize an electorate. So even a loss may not spell the end for Le Pen, who will be just 58 when the 2027 elections come around—and would no longer have to face Macron, who would be barred from serving a third consecutive term.

With the French center decimated and the left still divided, will there be a candidate strong enough to deny Le Pen again? (To understand why Le Pen might remain a serial loser, read Emile Chabal and Michael C. Behrent’s analysis from earlier this week.)

What the world is saying. With Le Pen within arm’s reach of Macron, some world leaders have gotten off the fence.

In a rare foray into French politics, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made the case for Macron in a Le Monde op-ed on Thursday. Sharing a byline with his left-leaning counterparts Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa, the three men presented a choice between “a democratic candidate, who believes that France grows in a powerful EU. And a far-right candidate, who openly sides with those attacking our freedom and democracy.”

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former Brazilian president (and by the looks of polls, the next one too), has also stated his support for Macron, describing the election as one where “the future of democracy” is at stake.

Although Biden has not publicly expressed his preference, his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, still might. The former president would be leaving it late; he already had backed Macron by this time in the 2017 election cycle.

Perhaps doing Le Pen a favor, given the distance she has tried to put between herself and the Russian leader during her campaign, Russian President Vladimir Putin has stayed silent. Her ideological allies in Hungary and Poland have too.

Imprisoned Russian dissident Alexey Navalny has also stumped for Macron—while skewering his opponent, saying on Twitter that any so-called conservative who is sympathetic to Putin “is actually just a hypocrite with no conscience.”

When will we know the result? Barring a too-close-to-call election, exit polls should predict the winner by the time voting ends at 8 p.m. Paris time on Sunday (2 p.m. in Washington).

Modi meets Johnson. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosts his British counterpart, Boris Johnson, today in New Delhi. The two are expected to discuss defense and energy ties as well as prospects for a bilateral trade deal, with formal negotiations resuming next week. Johnson returns to the United Kingdom on Saturday, where he will soon be investigated by a panel of members of Parliament over claims he misled them in his statements regarding the “Partygate” scandal.

Fire at Russian defense facility. A fire at a defense research facility in Tver—about 100 miles from Moscow—killed seven people and injured 25, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. The blaze erupted in a building housing an aerospace research institute, which is part of the country’s defense ministry. Photos of the building suggest its upper floors were completely gutted. Reports of a second mysterious fire at a chemical plant emerged a few hours later and remain unconfirmed.

$800 million more. On Thursday, Biden announced a further $800 million in military aid to Ukraine, a package that includes heavy artillery and 150,000 rounds of ammunition. The aid also includes dozens of “Phoenix Ghost” drones, unmanned aerial combat vehicles “rapidly developed by the Air Force in response specifically to Ukrainian requirements,” said U.S. Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby.

The shipments will come too late for Ukrainians in Mariupol, where new mass graves were reported on Thursday using satellite imagery. The status of the city itself is disputed: Putin congratulated Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in a televised meeting, saying “the work of the armed forces to liberate Mariupol has been a success.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky maintains that the city has not completely fallen, with “a few thousand people” still defending the city’s steel plant.

Slovenia’s election. Slovenians vote for a new parliament on Sunday, with Prime Minister Janez Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party in a close race with the environmentalist Freedom Movement. Both parties are polling at around 26 percent, all but assuring a coalition government. Jansa has been one of the most outspoken European leaders in support of Ukraine and was among the first to visit Zelensky in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, after Russia’s invasion.

A Brazilian court has ordered tech giant Apple to pay just over $1,000 to an iPhone customer for failing to provide a charger with the product. The judge ruled that by not providing a charger with the purchase, Apple had violated Brazil’s consumer protection laws, which says that certain electronic devices cannot be sold without chargers if they are critical to the device’s operation.

The ruling is part of an ongoing battle between Apple and Brazil’s consumer protection agency, which has already fined the company millions of dollars for not including chargers with its phones.

Phone chargers are not only a political concern in Brazil. On Wednesday, the European Parliament backed a proposal to mandate a common charger for all portable devices.