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Emmanuel Macron, LREM
La République en Marche (litt. The Republic on the move)
Libwashed rightoid
Polling around 24%

Who is he? 43-year-old president of France. Studied political science and philosophy, worked as an Inspector of Finances and as a banker. He was a left-wing political activist in his youth, and was part of the Socialist Party between 2006 and 2009. He became deputy secretary-general of the Élysée in 2012, and out of nowhere is appointed as minister of the economy in 2014. Being popular, he resigned in 2016 and launched his own political movement. He successfully ‘dynamited’ French politics by running as a centrist liberal in the 2017 presidential elections. Following a series of coincidences, he finally became the youngest ever president of France at age 39. Since then, he’s been an obviously controversial president but nonetheless more popular than his predecessors.

What’s his project? Macron hasn’t even announced his candidacy. But he shifted to the right for sure these last years, putting emphasis on security with controversial laws that protected police brutality from being caught on-tape, he talked a lot about problems caused by immigration (he didn’t do shit obviously), liberalized the economy slowly but noticeably. He also reacted quickly to people’s wishes lately, launching new nukes at the moment the idea was becoming popular, and being quick to give a 100€ ‘inflation check’ to millions of people to counter the energy price increases.
But no official presidential campaign yet. Rumors have it that he plans to launch it as late in possible, probably in February, to keep the image of a serious head of state who cares about his country before caring about his career. Nonetheless, he is unofficially campaigning by announcing bombastic projects, most notably France 2030.
France 2030 is an investment plan of 30 billion euro with three main objectives: produce better, live better, understand the world better. Behind these shallow words are mostly innovation plans in low-carbon cars and planes, space adventure, and culture.

Who votes for him? In 2017, his voting base was a mix of yuppies, upper-middle to upper-class middle-aged people, business leaders, retired old people who liked the stability he promised, plus quite a lot of people among a variety of demographics who voted for him solely because he was ‘young and dynamic’ plus allegedly handsome (I disagree).
Now, his voting base has quite shifted. Now, his two strongest demographics are the very young (18-24 yo) and the oldest (65+ yo). His success in the 18-24 age bracket is, I believe, all about his image, as he did videos with very famous and popular youtubers, talked about mangas, played a charity soccer match and keeps a youthful image that seduces a lot of young people. On the other side of the population, old people like him even more than before, because he promises stability, to keep the status quo on many things, and because the traditional right has lost influence. He underperforms somewhat with middle-aged people but still does alright with the urban upper-class.
A note on Muslims. You’d think that because of the outrage and boycott in Muslim countries due to Macron condoning the blasphemous caricatures, Macron’s offensive against [islamic] separatism, and his minister telling Le Pen she is ‘too soft on Islam’, Muslims in France hate him. Actually, even though lots of ‘anti-islamophobia activists’ do, most Muslims are pretty chill about all of this, most don’t dislike him in my experience and many will enthusiastically vote for him in the first round.

How could he gain ground? There’s just no credible and inspiring center-left and center-right candidates. Macron has a lot of potential in rallying people who are looking for a shelter from the rise of the perceived extremes.
How could he lose ground? Just the fact that he’s the president, really. Many French people tend to attribute all of the world’s evil to the current president, and then to vote for a candidate with the exact same policies instead.

Particular measure that I find noteworthy: As compensation for the pandemic, he offered every 18-year-old 300€ that they could spend solely on cultural products (books, movies...). I think it’s just a good idea in general but it was also quite a clever way to boost the profits of the cultural sectors while gaining all the the new voters for himself.


Valérie Pécresse, LR
Les Républicains (litt. The Republicans)
Rightoid
Polling around 10%

Who is she? 54-year-old French politician. Born and raised in a very privileged environment. Strangely enough, she learnt Russian at age 15, at a summer camp of the Communist Youths in Yalta. She went through the most prestigious business school in France, and then the National School of Administration, where she was one of the best students, and began a career in governmental bodies. She began her political career in 1997 and quickly climbed the ladder, as she became an MP of the mainstream conservative party in 2002, and was appointed minister of higher education in 2007. After the defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 she had to leave the government, but was elected president of the Île-de-France region in 2015, and reelected in 2021. The Île-de-France region is basically Paris metropolitan area, however, France is not a federal country, and being the president of a region is nothing like being a governor in terms of power. Nevertheless, her assessment at the head of the region is generally viewed positively. She’s a devout catholic but says she doesn’t mingle it with politics, although she was strongly against gay marriage and stuff.

What’s her project? Her measures are basically the usual ring-wing shit: a lot of workforce reduction in officials except teachers, policemen and healthcare workers; increase of the retirement age, building tens of thousands of additional prison spaces, harsher sentences for a variety of crimes, mild deregulation of employment, lowering the age of criminal responsibility. Only one type of increase in social welfare: more family allowances and natality bonuses to push for a higher birthrate.
Many people think she was decent at managing her region and that’s basically what her presidency would be about: managing France. Just managing the country with a ring-wing stance, no ambitious project, nothing inspiring except ‘restoring authority’.
She’s also trying to appear tough on immigration and Islam because she knows that the general public asks for it, but when you actually look at her proposed measures, they’re either weak or simply non-applicable. That’s not surprising: we know she’s a fickle person, sometimes she was trying to be the centrist one, sometimes the hard-right one, who knows, it depends on the political climate.
She proudly describes herself as ‘two-thirds Merkel, one third Thatcher’, which is pretty telling.

Who votes for her? Bourgeois, especially 65+. Maybe a noticeable amount of people from the Paris metropolitan area who are satisfied with the way she manages their region.

How could she gain ground? First, she ain’t far from being a clone of Macron with ovaries, which could be a minus or a plus. But, more importantly, her party LR, although considerably weaker than five years ago, is still a strong party, and recently re-gained a lot of adherents in the three months preceding the internal primary (that she won against Éric Ciotti, Michel Barnier and Xavier Bertrand). Now that they settled for a candidate, they might become a war machine. Strong networks, strong local presence, strong finances, strong everything.

How could she lose ground? As on many points she’s close to being a less inspiring version of Macron, why vote for her instead of Macron? Plus, her challengers will definitely remind her that she was a faithful Sarkozyst and that she’s been involved in shady stuff, such as a mock meeting of 1500 people in 2019, most of whom were paid to be there.
Particular measure that I find noteworthy: She recently proposed that crimes committed in so-called ‘quartiers de reconquête républicaine’ aka ghettos would be automatically punished more harshly than if they’d been committed elsewhere. Just a baffling, unjust, discriminatory measure, that she absolutely knows is unconstitutional and unenforceable and that shows she’s just Zemmour-baiting for votes.


Marine Le Pen, RN
Rassemblement National (litt. National Rally)
Far-right(ish?)
Polling around 19,5%

Who is she? 53-year-old French MP. She’s the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, former soldier and founder of the National Front, a catch-all far-right party that from the beginning mingled a variety of diverse and contradictory far-right movements. Jean-Marie Le Pen was from a modest background but his family became wealthy when Marine was eight years old, thanks to the inheritance of a friend. She had a career as an attorney, during which she defended multiple illegal immigrants among other people. She adhered to her father’s party as young as 18 but she only took a prominent role in 2002, during her father’s surprise accession to the second round of the presidential election. After her father’s retirement, she became the president of the National Front in 2011, and got a record share of 17,9% of votes in the 2012 presidential elections. Her strategy has been to ‘de-demonize’ her party to aim for popular support more realistically, to the point of excluding her own father because he kept making too many controversial and provocative statements. In the 2017 presidential elections, she made it to the second round with 21,3% of the vote in the first round, but due to a disastrous debate against Macron, she only managed to get 34% of the vote in the second round (although that’s still a lot for a supposed extremist against a supposed catch-all centrist). Later on, she renamed her party and the National Front became the National Rally.

What’s her project? She focuses on two things: ‘Give to the French their money back’ and ‘Give to the French their country back’.
While she dropped leaving the EU and the euro as she understood it’s become too unpopular now, she wants to rule against supremacy of EU law just like Poland did. She has softened her discourse on the clash of civilization, most notably she’s saying Islam as a religion is not a problem but only islamism as a political ideology is. Clearly, she wants to appear as someone who wants to rally people to a common nationalist ideal instead of dividing people along ethnic and religious lines, and she wants a government of ‘national union’, with patriots and protectionists from all across the political spectrum. Her measures are still harsh on immigration and Islam tho, she wants to reduce new entrances a lot, to expell any foreigner who’s convicted, even those in a regular situations, to drastically reduce many social welfares for foreigners and to ban the veil in a variety of contexts.
Her phrase ‘Give to the French their money back’ is about purchasing power, mostly, and it’s unclear. She wants to boost people’s purchasing power with lower taxes on fuel, the removal of TV fees by privatizing public television service (which leans left lol), and on the contrary the re-nationalization of motorways, but that’s not enough. She has a vague ‘reindustrialization’ plan but I don’t see her programme (2017 one, the new one isn’t out yet) proposing nationalizing industries on any big scale, although she occasionally proposed to nationalize some particular factories.
She has measures about protectionism, against posted workers and low-skilled immigration that should protect French working-class jobs as a result, although some are very unclear and some have likely become impossible now that she’s dropped leaving the EU.
Actually, small to mid-size businesses should be the ones to profit from her policies the most, thanks to lower taxation. But the problem is, she wants not only to decrease their taxes but to decrease a whole lot of taxes in different areas of the economy, while investing a lot and while not taxing the richest more—she doesn't have anything against the richest, most exploitative and privileged people as long as they keep their jobs in France and employ French nationals, she barely talks about tax fraud in comparison to social welfare fraud by foreigners.
So how is she going to finance this? Especially now that she's dropped leaving the EU and has to abide by European budgetary rules? We don't really know, her vague answer is protectionism, fighting against social fraud and cutting aids to foreigners will finance it.
She’s surprisingly not extremely conservative on social issues. Like yeah there’s still this catholic conservative wing in her party led by her niece Marion Maréchal (she temporarily left the party but she’s still very influential) but other parts of her party want her to be very measured especially on LGBT issues. Like the Yellow Vests asked for, she wants it possible to have nationwide referendums on popular demand, and she hopes to settle divisive issues this way.

Who votes for her? It is often said that Le Pen’s electorate is similar to Trump’s: it skews white, non-college educated, rural. Yes and no. While this is mostly true, there are also pretty big differences:

Unlike Trump’s, Le Pen’s voting base skews young. Her best age bracket is 25-34 yo, and her worst age bracket is 65+yo by far. Her scores are terribly subpar among older people and she’d have a much better shot at winning the whole thing if old people didn’t have such a crazy high turnout so consistently.
Unlike Trump’s, Le Pen’s voting base skews irreligious. While many of her voters are attached to the ‘Christian roots’ of France, actually practicing Christians generally despise her.

So, she’s mostly popular in rural places and in small towns in de-industrialized regions, where people feel like they’re forgotten by politicians. She’s also doing well in middle-sized cities in the south and in the east, and does okay-ish in poor immigrant-filled suburbs of big cities, but her scores are absolutely abysmal in middle-class and upper-class neighborhoods in big cities such as in central Paris.

How could she gain ground? Zemmour is actually helping her recenter. She was the devil incarnate of French politics, and now that there’s someone more extreme than her on her right, she’s more easily perceived as the rational and the reasonable one. Plus people are just so fed up, the right’s been tried multiple times, the left’s been tried multiple times, the center too, so why not RN? People aren’t that scared of her anymore, they don’t have the pavlovian reflex of voting against her automatically. She’s, on the contrary, maybe more normal than ever.

How could she lose ground? She lost her Russian fundings and doesn’t have much money for her presidential campaign. She’s seen as both too soft for many nationalists and too evil by many people who, while acknowledging that she is more moderate than her father, know that her party is still filled with people that Americans would call white supremacists.
She had an awful debate against Macron back in 2017 that might have discredited her forever. She might have got better at debating but she’s probably still not good especially when it comes to discussing economics.
I also think that her identity project is uninspiring to many as it lacks a definition of what the fuck is even France. Like every nationalist in the media, she only defines France by what it’s not, rather than by what it is, other than some pictures of landscapes and monuments. That’s far from enough to arouse patriotic sentiment in the masses.

Particular measure that I find interesting: She cares about animal welfare and she’s in favor of adding a chapter on animal rights to the Civil Code. Remember which other leader cared about animal welfare? Adolf Hitler.


Éric Zemmour
Idependant, will probably launch his own party soon
Far-right
Polling around 13%

Who is he? 63-year-old French journalist. Born in Paris suburbs from two Algerian Jews. As a journalist, he wrote in a variety of journals from 1986 to 2006 and published his first book in 2006, Le Premier Sexe, an essay about the disaster of the modern world moving from traditional patriarchy to a feminized society. Since then, his popularity exploded as he appeared in many talk-shows in the media, making himself known as a polemist who keeps sharing controversial an deliberately provocative views on a variety of topics. He once tried to convict a rapper of insult and defamation (he happens to think that rap music is a culture of illiterate people), but was himself convicted of hate speech twice.
From 2019 to 2021, he had his own TV show on the channel CNews, as a deliberate choice by billionaire Bolloré to push his political views. Despite this show barely containing any debate and mostly consisting of Zemmour exposing his views without contradiction, it was a big success in terms of viewership and contributed to the best-seller status of his last book France hasn’t said its last word.

What’s his project? Generally, let’s say he’s very right-wing on pretty much any conceivable issue. He’s harsh regarding security issues, calls for more police forces, more prison spaces, harsher sentences, cutting public welfare to parents of criminal kids.
He says he’s ‘attached to our social system’ but calls for market and employment deregulations, increasing the retirement age, massively lowering taxes on businesses, lowering property taxes. His line is calling for liberalism inside the country but protectionism outside the country, with the usual vague promises of re-industrialization.
Regarding identity and immigration, contrary to Le Pen, he explicitly targets Islam, saying that there is no difference between Islam and islamism, wanting to ban any kind of veil on the street and calling for Muslim to ‘christianize’ their faith, i.e. to make their faith more spiritual and less about abiding by material laws. He emphasizes the Catholic identity of France while not being catholic himself (he’s both an atheist and a practicing Jew), acknowledging that he’s ‘for the Church but against Christ’. He obviously wants to stop almost all immigration, to drastically reduce public aids to foreigners, to deport convicted immigrants just like Le Pen, but also to deprive convicted French nationals of their French nationality if they have dual citizenship, and obviously deport them to their other country.
There’s also his famous measure about first names, that’s been quite misunderstood by many. The thing is, he doesn’t want to force immigrants to change their name, but he wants people to only be able to call their newborn with a French first name, as is the case in many countries. The parents could still be free to chose anything as the second name of their newborn.
What I must concede is that, contrary to Le Pen and to most public figures emphasizing nationalism, Zemmour does a good job at arousing national sentiment, because instead of just saying that France isn’t Islam, isn’t wokeism or whatever, he talks a lot about famous and inspiring French figures, about French history, French art, French architecture, French cuisine, French classical music etc.

Who votes for him? I think, quite a significant number of different people across a variety of demographics who feel euphorically stimulated by his nationalism. But he’s definitely more popular among upper-class bourgeois, often older people, who’ve always been strongly against immigration but couldn’t bring themselves to vote pour Le Pen as she’s too ‘white trash’.

How could he gain ground? First, there are entire media outlets dedicated at making him win. And while old, he’s one of the bests at Internet communication. He has a very active fanbase that constantly make new memes and stuff about him. Plus, his radicalism is refreshing for many. Contrary to other candidates who might be discredited by scandals, he loves scandals, he lives by scandals, he’s all about scandals—in this regard, he’s similar to Trump.

How could he lose ground? Obviously, many things turn people off him. He has a very precise project to win the election: to rally both the working class and the patriotic bourgeoisie. But I’m doubtful, because:

His economical liberalism gives away his deep disconnection with the working class. There was this surreal scene once, when an LFI (Mélenchon’s party) MP decried his project of raising the age of retirement, saying that such a measure would disproportionately affect poor people, as the poors have a significantly shorter life expectancy than wealthy people on average, and as many construction workers and factory workers are already in bad health in their 50s with a broken back etc. Zemmour only insisted that raising the age of retirement was for the best because ‘Work does you good’. He himself has never done any kind of manual work in his life, he was even discharged from his military service because he was too soy, and half of his ‘job’ of journalism consists of having fancy dinners with famous people.
He is a misogynist, calling for the restoration of traditional patriarchy, repeatedly saying that women can’t embody power, and having multiple sexual assaults accusations to deal with. And it isn’t without consequences: polls show that he does much worse with women than with men. And Marine Le Pen knows that she can utilize this to attract his female voters and further widen the gap.

Particular measure that I find interesting: He wants to legalize weed! He’s said that he’d rather not, but that since more and more repression hasn’t worked at all, we have no other choice than legalizing it. This is, uh, unexpected of him.

Other candidates

Approximately from left to right.
Note that again, not all of them will manage to get the 500 backings necessary to be confirmed as a candidate.


Anasse Kazib, RP
Révolution Permanente (litt. Permanent Revolution)
Revolutionary communist
As a railwayman, he’s one of the few candidates to have a real job. As a member of Poutou’s New Anticapitalist Party, he made himself known for participating in various talk-shows. He splitted from NPA in 2021 because he found the party not radical enough. He’s anti-capitalism, anti-police, anti- any X-phobia, anti-national identity, anti-patriotism, anti- a lot of things really. The fact he’s of Moroccan origin doesn’t go unnoticed: while on the one hand decolonialists think he’s part of the ‘white left’, as ‘just because you put a non-white person at the head of a white movement doesn’t make this movement decolonial’, on the other hand he is a victim of constant racial abuse from the fachosphère especially since he took pride in the fact that no French flag would be waving at his meetings and no French anthem would be sung.

Philippe Poutou, NPA
Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (litt. New Anticapitalist Party)
Revolutionary communist
Head of the NPA, Philippe Poutou managed to get enough signatures to be an official candidate in 2012 and 2017 and he got 1,15% and 1,09% respectively. As a factory worker for Ford, he was with Nathalie Arthaud one of the two candidates to have a real job instead of being a professional politician, but he was fired in 2019 because the Ford plant closed.
He openly admits that he doesn’t want to win the election. So why is he there? Well, I personally think that having someone like that is very important. He doesn’t wear a suit, he doesn’t have a tie, he speaks without self-censorship, he doesn’t try to be politically correct, he openly calls out politicians on TV for their financial delinquency. He’s a way to remind all of us how much professional politicians live in their own world with its own rules.

Nathalie Arthaud, LO
Lutte Ouvrière (litt. Worker’s Struggle)
Revolutionary communist
Nathalie Arthaud is a teacher in management and economics in high school, in an underprivileged suburb of Paris. She managed to be an official candidate in 2012 and 2017 and she got 0,56% and 0,64% respectively. Despite its revolutionary trotskist stance, LO used to be a much bigger party under the leadership of Arlette Laguiller, who managed to get more than 5% of the vote in 1995 and 2002.
Arthaud’s movement is quite similar to Poutou’s and Kazib’s. The main differences are that she stays closer to orthodox trotskism, she is distrustful of idpol and she has a more intellectual approach to communist discourse.

Fabien Roussel, PCF
Parti Communiste Français (litt. French Communist Party)
Hard left
In 2012 and 2017, the members of the French Communist Party voted to join Mélenchon’s bid instead of running their own candidate. This time, because of disagreements with LFI they chose to support Roussel running alone.
While not being truly communist, Roussel’s economic plan is even further left than Mélenchon’s. He proposes a whole bunch of nationalizations, a whole bunch of new taxes for the rich and the big companies, hundreds of thousands of new jobs in public companies and public services.
However, contrary to Mélenchon, he is pro-nuclear power and insists on public safety and criminality, saying that the left shouldn’t be lenient regarding these issues. For this reason, he’s sometimes considered by radlibs to be a nazbol or some rightoid in disguise, and maybe to counter this, he’s calling for Le Pen and Zemmour to be silenced and banned.

Georges Kuzmanovic, RS
République Souveraine (litt. Sovereign Republic)
‘Beyond the right-left divide’
Born Djordje Kuzmanović in Serbia. Former LO activist and humanitarian worker, he was one of the first people to join Mélenchon’s new party in 2008. Because of a series of disagreements with the idpol-ish wing of the movement, most notably because he opposed immigration and felt like feminist and LGBT+ struggles were secondary, he splitted from LFI in 2018 to launch his own party, République Souveraine.
His project combines the left-wing economic aspects of Mélenchon’s with more traditionally patriotic, more anti-EU and anti-radlib aspects, without being an outright conservative.

Arnaud Montebourg
Independant
Protectionist left
Old-established political activist in the Socialist Party (PS), he longed to be the socialist candidate in the 2012 presidential elections. He ended third in the primaries with 17,19% of the vote, and was appointed Minister of the Economy a few months later. He made himself famous for promoting ‘made in France’ products and trying to block any attempt from foreign companies to repurchase French businesses. Disappointed by Hollande’s liberal policies, he steps down in 2014.
Despite announcing his retreat from political life in 2017, he announced his intention to be a candidate in the 2022 presidential elections a few months a go, running with a combination of strong leftism and strong protectionism and patriotism.

Hélène Thouy, PA
Partie Animaliste (litt. Animalist Party)
Animal rights activist
The animalist party is a single-issue party founded in 2016 by seven people including Hélène Thouy, focused on protecting animals from any kind of cruelty and on progressively reducing meat production and consumption. This party was a surprise in the 2019 European election, making 2,2% of the vote despite very little campaign expenditures, and many polling stations lacking ballot papers.
I think they have the potential to be a good surprise next year, as they have the potential to mobilize many abstainers who don’t care about politics and have their hearts softened by cute dogs and cats on displays, but the debates could be awkward given that they have nothing to say unrelated to animals.

Jean Lassalle
Résistons ! (litt. Let’s Resist!)
Rural right
Born in a family of shepherds deep in the Pyrenees, he was elected mayor of his natal village in 1977 and became one of the youngest mayors in the country at age 21. In 2002, he was elected MP of his local constituency as a member of the centrist party UDF-MoDem. He’s always been a bit of a conservative but not a corporate-style conservative, more like someone who’s deeply entrenched with deep-rooted traditions. He’s the only candidate to have such a thick regional accent and the only candidate, as far as I know, who has a regional language as his mother tongue.
Throughout his life, he’s always stood up for the interests of rurality and local workers. In 2006, it was announced that a manufacturing plant in his valley, which employed 150 workers, would move. To protest, Jean Lassalle announced in the National Assembly that he began a hunger strike. Six weeks later, he had lost 31kg (68lbs) and had to be hospitalized in a critical condition. Due to the intervention of the then-president Chirac and several ministers, the company gave up moving the manufacturing plant. Lassalle, however, would suffer of the consequences of his courage for life. He’s never been the same.
He created his own party and managed to be a candidate in the 2017 president elections and got 1,21% of the vote with little to no campaign expenditures, as he’d basically traveled across France to talk to people and couchsurf. But he was already not very articulate back then, and his physical and mental state has obviously deteriorated even more as of today.

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, DLF
Debout la France (litt. France Arise)
Right/far-right euroskeptic
Dupont-Aignan is kind of the bourgeois version of Marine Le Pen, or the euroskeptic version of conservative candidates. While he was already an MP and a mayor, he already ran twice for presidency in 2012 and 2017 and got 1,8% and 4,7% of the vote respectively.
After the first round in the 2017 elections, he reached an agreement with Marine Le Pen to openly support her in the second round in exchange for a hypothetical appointment as her prime minister. Of course, it was a failure, it discredited him and he’s less popular now.

François Asselineau, UPR
Union Populaire Républicaine (litt. Republican Popular Union)
Euroskeptic
While Asselineau is undoubtedly a right-wing man, his platform is truly beyond the right/left divide. He aims at rallying people from all across the political spectrum behind a common goal: leaving the EU and the euro currency. He’s popular for his lectures where he details the misdeeds and the structural problems of the EU, though he’s been accused of lot of conveying conspiracy theories.
His militant base is extremely devoted and gives him a strong presence on the web as well as on public displays. However, few, if any medias talked about him before the 2017 presidential election, and the French version of Wikipedia refused to allow his page to exist back then, which sparkled accusations of censorship. In spite of these difficulties, he raised enough signatures for his candidacy in the 2017 presidential elections and received 0,8% of the vote. Since then, he’s been accused of several sexual assaults and a significant part of his party has left for this reason.

Florian Philippot, LP
Les Patriotes (litt. The Patriots)
Euroskeptic
Former vice-president of Le Pen’s party and one of her closest advisors. He represented a more secular and social wing of her party, focusing less on ‘societal issues’; he famously compared the question of gay marriage as being as relevant in politics as bonsai cultivation. He left the party in 2017 after Le Pen chose to drop part of her euroskepticism.
His platform is very close to Asselineau’s, in that he first and foremost wants to leave the EU and the euro, and that other problems are generally less relevant. He’s also the leading figure of the COVID-skeptic movement, and a lot of people joined him lately for this reason.
The idea of a reconciliation, or even a common ticket with Asselineau is often raised, but Asselineau is reluctant to associate with Philippot, as Philippot is generally categorized as far-right due to his past in the National Front.

Conclusion

tl,dr: Macron will most likely win the election, but the right/far-right will win the battle of ideas. Nonetheless, I don’t think anyone can predict the eventual powers relations.
Early in May, the president elect (if it's a new one) will be inaugurated and in June, the French legislative elections will take place, where the National Assembly will be elected. 577 MPs will be elected by a similar two round system, each in one of the 577 constituencies. Note that the newly elected president might dissolve the Assembly the very day they’re inaugurated, so that the legislative elections would take place a few weeks or days earlier than planned, so that the president takes advantage of their momentum to have a majority.