Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron have pulled further in front in opinion polls for next month’s French presidential election ahead of the first televised debate Monday. Macron, a centrist independent, and Le Pen, the far-right leader of the National Front, have extended their advantage over Republican François Fillon, whose campaign has been dogged by an investigation into alleged fraud.

Macron and Le Pen were tied with 26 percent of the vote, with Fillon falling back to 17 percent, in a poll conducted by Kantar Sofres released Sunday. There was a setback, too, for the candidate for the governing Socialist party, Benoît Hamon, who fell back to 12 percent, level with left-wing former Socialist party member Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Current President François  Hollande announced in December that he will not seek a second term.

French voters will go to the polls for the first round of the election on April 23, with the top two candidates then going onto a second round run-off on May 7.

It would take a major swing in the final month of the campaign for the run-off not to be between Macron and Le Pen. And it would take a similar momentum switch for Macron not to ultimately emerge victorious. Polls have consistently shown Macron beating Le Pen in the second round with around two-thirds of the vote.

However, Monday’s first debate is significant. The latest poll indicated that 30 percent of voters remained undecided. And the poll showed that those indicating that they would vote for Le Pen are far more steadfast in their commitment compared with those voicing a preference for Macron. While 75 percent of Le Pen supporters said they would not change their minds, only 51 percent of potential voters for Macron said the same.

Although Fillon has seen himself go from election favorite to longshot following an investigation into charges that he paid family members for jobs they didn’t perform, Le Pen appears to have emerged unscathed from a similar “fake jobs” scandal.

David Fuller's view

Today, there is little evidence of any popular, dominant presidential candidate in France.  However, candidates with a chance of winning have moved towards the right, as we also saw in The Netherlands after a similarly acrimonious campaign.

For Emmanuel Macron, this amounts to a move from the left to a centrist independent position, at least so far.  I assume he will certainly move further to the right if he and Marine Le Pen move through to the second round.  She really is the protest vote candidate but cannot escape the shadow of her father, despite considerable efforts to do so over a number of years.