Eager to steer attention away from her Russian baggage, Le Pen has focused her campaign on economic issues. It turned out to be the right move. Polls now show that purchasing power is the No. 1 concern of French voters as inflation looms and gas prices soar amid Putin’s war. She offered a sharp contrast to Macron’s sweeping technocratic vision of France and its unpopular measures like pension reform and an older retirement age. Instead, she has called for tax cuts and contrasted the economic situation of elites in cities to the struggling working classes in rural areas, where her support is strong.

Macron’s effort to shed a tag as “president of the rich” has not been helped by a tempest over his administration’s extensive use of consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to formulate policy. In a huge preelection rally last Saturday aimed at recovering his momentum, Macron warned of the danger from the extreme right and cast himself as a protector of traditional French values of universalism and fraternity against “those who would sow the poison of division, to fragment and fracture people.” To ease the pain of high gas prices, his government installed a 15-cent per liter refund at the pump. He also harshly criticized Le Pen’s party, which he called a “clan,” for deploring the “Africanization of France.” Macron didn’t miss the opportunity to point out that he “wasn’t the one who sought financing in Russia.”

The brutality of Putin’s war and its social and economic consequences have muted the nascent debate about French identity.