PARIS �� France votes Sunday to select two presidential candidates for the runoff round of the 2017 election, whose results have the potential to determine how far the populist wave in Europe will go.
In a campaign that has remade the nation's political landscape, four candidates with radically different positions are in position to qualify for the next round, according to dozens of public opinion surveys. They are Marine Le Pen, who wants France to stop using Europe's single currency; Jean-Luc Melenchon, who wants to remake the rules that govern the monetary union; Francois Fillon, a former prime minister who wants tough economic reforms; and Emmanuel Macron, a centrist pro-European who has held a narrow but expanding lead for the past week.
The campaign has been long by French standards, starting in earnest last September as the Republicans held their first-ever primary, and it has overturned traditional French politics. Of the two parties that have run France for the past half-century, the governing Socialists have been reduced to also-rans ��their candidate, Benoit Hamon, is running in the single digits in polls. The Republicans, led by Fillon, also may not make the runoff vote.
The top two finishers of the 11 candidates will go into a runoff May 7.
Macron became the front-runner even though the party he founded is barely over a year old and he has before held elected office. Jostling with him for first place is Le Pen, who moved her father's National Front party from unacceptable in polite society to the center of the conversation �� if still holding anti-immigration and anti-euro positions.
Fillon lost his lead in the polls after a legal dispute over whether he hired his wife for a parliamentary staff job for which she did no work. And Melenchon, from the extreme left, unexpectedly moved up to fourth place in part because his campaign extensively used social media.
Before polling was suspended by law on Friday, Bloomberg's composite of French polls showed Macron had 24.5 percent support and Le Pen was in second place with 22.5 percent. While Fillon and Melenchon have the backing of 19.5 percent and 18.5 percent of the electorate respectively, the margins of error leave room for an upset, pollsters say. Hamon is at 7 percent.
An extra element of uncertainty entered the campaign late Thursday when a man shot dead one policeman and injured two others in the center of Paris. The assailant was shot and killed as he tried to escape.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday in an interview with the Associated Press that the incident will "probably help" Le Pen because she is "strongest on borders and she's the strongest on what's been going on in France." The nation has under a state of emergency since terrorist attacks in November 2015.
