Tory and Brexit supporters back far-right Marine Le Pen to become French president, poll reveals

Conservative voters want National Rally candidate to defeat Emmanuel Macron by 13-point margin

Conservative and Brexit supporters want the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen to become president of France in this weekend’s election, a poll shows.

The National Rally (RN) – formerly National Front – leader is backed by 37 per cent of Tory voters at the last election, while just 24 per cent support the centrist Emmanuel Macron.

The margin is even greater among Leave voters at the 2016 Brexit referendum, who prefer Ms Le Pen over the current president by 35 per cent to 19 per cent.

The two will go head-to-head in a critical run-off on Sunday, with polls putting Mr Macron as little as six points ahead of his rival.

The RN leader has sought to soften her public image compared with their last clash five years ago, but the party is widely criticised as still racist and xenophobic.

Ms Le Pen has vowed to ban the Muslim headscarf from public spaces, calling it a “uniform of totalitarian ideology”, while saying it is not the “most urgent element” of her programme.

She has promised a referendum on immigration, to create a “France for the French” –where native people would be prioritised over non-French people for benefits, housing, jobs and healthcare.

And she would remove the right of children born in France to foreign parents to get French nationality in their teenage years.

Ms Le Pen has dropped previous pledges to take France – a founder member of the EU and its second biggest economy – out of the Euro and the EU itself.

But observers say her policies on the economy, social policy and immigration imply breaking the rules of the 27-member bloc, in effect destroying it from within.

The strong correlation between support for Ms Le Pen and for the Conservatives is seen as evidence of how Boris Johnson has tapped similar “populist’ sentiment.

Across the UK population as a whole, Mr Macron is by far the preferred candidate, the Pollsters YouGov found, by 37 per cent to the RN leader’s 19 per cent.

However, no less than 44 per cent of the public replied “don’t know”, suggesting widespread ignorance about politics across the Channel.

Remain and Labour voters overwhelmingly back the sitting president, by 62 per cent to 7 per cent and 53 per cent to 8 per cent, respectively.

Ms Le Pen is making her third attempt to become president, having taken over the anti-immigration, far-right Front National from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

In 2018, she renamed it the National Rally and has focused this year’s campaign on the cost of living crisis, which is French voters’ top concern.

She has vowed to lower VAT on fuel and energy from 20 per cent to 5.5 per cent, would scrap income tax for everyone under the age of 30 and privatise public service broadcasting.