Ukraine is similarly dominating the electoral narrative in France, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from being there. Although the first round of the contest is only a week away, “it feels like there is no presidential campaign going on in France right now,” Georgina Wright, the director of the Europe program at Paris’s Institut Montaigne, told me. Just as in Hungary, “Ukraine has completely overshadowed the election.”

Although French voters rarely go to the polls with foreign policy at the front of their mind, the war has managed to buck this trend, owing at least in part to the fact that France has played a leading role in the West’s diplomatic wrangling with Russia. Macron not only traveled to Moscow in the weeks ahead of the war, in a last-ditch (and ultimately fruitless) effort to stave off a Russian invasion, but he has since fielded dozens of calls from both Putin and Zelensky in pursuit of a diplomatic resolution. Because of Russia’s role as a major continental gas supplier, the war will have a huge impact on European economies. “The French are looking at who can lead them through this crisis,” Wright said, “and there’s a sense that Macron is probably the only person able to do that.”

It helps that Macron is perhaps the only viable candidate who hasn’t been seen as too sympathetic to the Kremlin or its talking points. Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader who has reprised her role as Macron’s main rival, has made no secret of her affinity for Putin or of his investments in her previous campaigns. Despite her condemnation of the invasion, a photo of Le Pen with Putin still features in her campaign brochures. Meanwhile, the ascendant far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has long advocated for France to withdraw from NATO, has had to walk back comments playing down the threat posed by Moscow.