Marine Le Pen vs. Emmanuel Macron
Marine Le Pen is a Far-Right candidate running for President of France and a wanna-be ally of Putin. She wants France to leave NATO and create an alliance with Putin (once the Ukraine war is over). https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-04-23/explainer-macron-or-le-pen-why-it-matters-for-france-the-eu-and-the-west She would position French foreign policy as equidistant between the Kremlin and the US. She would like to renegotiate France’s role in the EU to give it greater control over immigration and the movement of goods within the EU. She would like to place much greater restrictions on free trade and on immigrants. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/le-pen-s-far-right-vision-retooling-france-at-home-abroad/ar-AAWtVxh?li=BB141NW3
On domestic issues, she wants to cut benefits for immigrants, cut taxes and increase certain aspects of social spending, like reducing the retirement age to 60; she is fiercely anti-Muslim. https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/ap-online/2022/04/23/frances-two-presidential-contenders-whos-proposing-what
Macron is a centrist and is completing his five year term as President. He has been a strong supporter of NATO, the EU, the US, and Ukraine. He has been pushing for changes in the economy to promote more entrepreneurship and innovation. During his Presidency, joblessness in the French economy has been reduced to its lowest level in a generation. He wants to gradually increase the minimum retirement age from 62 to 65 and increase the old age pensions.
LePen plans to bypass the provisions and guarantees of the French Constitution to enact many of her proposed reforms through a series of voter referendums, rather than the traditional legislative process. She takes this route because so many of her proposals squarely violate the French constitution. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/21/france-election-le-pen-ideology/ As just one of the examples, citizenship would no longer be available to persons born on the soil of France, but only to persons born to French citizens.
Just to provoke your imagination about what electing LePen could mean for Europe, think back to the Stalin-Hitler pact to divide up Poland in the lead up to World War II. Now think forward to a LePen-Putin pact and then towards the potential for a LePen/Putin/Trump alliance if Trump should prevail in our 2024 presidential elections.