France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen is the top voter in the first round of the presidential election, according to a poll published on Wednesday and taken by AFP, Agerpres reports.

Like many other EU member states, France is experiencing a consolidation of the popularity of far-right parties. The next French presidential election will not be held until 2027, but this poll is relevant in the run-up to the European Parliament elections in June.

This is the first time that Marine Le Pen, who has already reached the second round of presidential elections twice, receives such a high number of votes of 36% (with a margin of error of 3%) in a poll for a hypothetical first round. presidential election, receiving 13 percentage points more than the intention to vote in a similar survey conducted in 2022.

In a poll published on Wednesday, the proposed candidate from the camp of center-right incumbent Emmanuel Macron (who is in his second term and cannot run again), current Prime Minister Gabriel Attal or his predecessor Edouard Philippe, is in second place with 22% intentions to vote. In third place in this poll, we find the leader of the radical left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, with 14%.

In the second round, if Edouard Philippe got here, he and Marine Le Pen would have the same voting intentions, about 50% each, but if the far-right leader faced Gabriel Attal, she would beat the incumbent prime minister. minister with 51%, but the difference of two percentage points between them is within the poll’s margin of error.

But in the hypothesis of a second round in which Marine Le Pen will face Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-right leader will win in a landslide with 64% of the vote, the same poll conducted by the Ifop institute on January 31 and February 1 also shows a representative sample of 1,081 people .