At the same time, Le Pen has cleverly expanded her political tent. Ever since taking over the reins of the family business from her father, she has staked her bets on a detoxification of the far right. She has mostly stopped indulging in nostalgia for the Vichy regime, has tried to move on from the party’s anti-Semitic history, and has claimed to defend the rights of women and sexual minorities against the threat supposedly posed by intolerant immigrants.

After showing limited effects for many years, this strategy is bearing fruit. During Macron’s tenure, Le Pen has focused much of her rhetoric on bread-and-butter economic issues, promising to protect the welfare state and boost the incomes of the poor; this has improved her standing among working-class voters. Meanwhile, Éric Zemmour, a best-selling author, has outflanked her on the extreme right, making her seem reasonable by comparison. Both developments have helped to “soften” Le Pen’s image.

Some right-leaning voters who once considered voting for an extremist candidate like Le Pen a betrayal of the French Republic are now openly supporting her. Some of Macron’s former supporters on the center-left are likely to stay home because they just can’t stomach voting for him. And a number of far-left voters who “held their nose” and cast their ballot against the archenemy on the far right five years ago are now telling pollsters that they will back Le Pen. The more he listens to Macron, one left-wing voter with North African roots said in a recent focus group, the more he is tempted to support Le Pen—“even though I have the face of an Arab.”