His sober manner and polished image as the responsible, clean-hands candidate put him up with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen at the top of the first-round polls, and he was forecast to defeat her handsomely in the run-off. Le Pen is followed by the leading centrist in the race, 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron, the center-right Francois Fillon -- who is surviving despite a scandal surrounding government payments to his wife -- and Melenchon, whose meteoric rise in the past few weeks stunned the establishment. "The competition is very high in this election," says Guillaume Liegey, cofounder of the Paris campaign technology company Liegey Muller Pons, who helped design Macron's political strategy last year when he abandoned France's deeply unpopular leader to launch his new movement, En Marche!
New polls show François Fillon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon neck and neck behind the frontrunners Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen ahead of the upcoming first round of the election.