by Chris Black
Marine Le Pen delivered her most spectacular performance to date.
The most striking feature of the debate was the stark contrast between Madame Le Pen’s performance between the first and second halves.
In the first half of the debate Le Pen kept to her track record of poor performance. Madame Le Pen rambled, ranted, was entirely unable to answer a question about her 2015 loan from a Russian bank and randomly digressed into a tangent about Africa in the middle of a discussion about the European Union.
By the end of the first hour we were not hopeful that this debate would bolster the poll numbers for Marine Le Pen, which have been static at around 46% since the first round of the election. Things were looking bleak.
Then things changed in the second hour. Marine Le Pen managed to make Emmanuel Macron look like an uncaring monster on the issue of senior care; she trounced him on the issue of nuclear power and brilliantly managed to make a discussion about climate change refocus on the detriments of de-industrialization and free trade. And of course Madame Le Pen easily won the exchange about immigration and security.
Madame Le Pen executed a brilliant attack on the incumbent President for attempting to take credit for supporting businesses which he repeatedly forced to close during the COVID-19 pandemic, rendering them unable to reliably operate.
Macron was reduced to complaining about phraseology and the form of questions in the second half of the debate.
White-Papers is hopeful that this debate will propel Marine Le Pen to victory in the French Presidential Election. Only the French can decide how they are going to react to this debate and how they are going to vote come April 24th.