The importance of the meeting between Biden and Macron 0:32
(CNN) --
In early 2022, France's upcoming presidential election looked set to be one of the country's most closely watched political races in decades.
A sitting president running for election for the second time in his life;
a candidate twice convicted of inciting racism and religious hatred in the polls in second place;
another far-right stalwart in third place and the dominant left of French politics in disarray.
But then it happened: Russia invaded Ukraine.
With Europe's eyes firmly fixed on Russia's President Vladimir Putin's bloody war, priorities have shifted rapidly: Ammunition stockpiles, high-stakes diplomacy and even the threat of nuclear attack have entered the national debate.
The campaign has been interrupted by the crisis and several key candidates have had to reverse their former support for Putin.
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Macron officially announces his candidacy for re-election as President of France
Polished by his experience on the world stage, most polls suggest incumbent President Emmanuel Macron is likely to come out on top.
But with the election just days away, her closest rival, Marine Le Pen, is rising in the polls, suggesting the vote could be closer than the last time the pair went head-to-head in 2017.
France hasn't re-elected a sitting president in 20 years, diplomacy has trumped campaigning on the president's agenda, and with the conflict fueling a cost-of-living crisis, French voters aren't facing the elections many expected.
This is what you should know.
When are the elections in France and how do they work?
To elect their new president, French voters will likely go to the polls twice.
The first vote, on Sunday, April 10, pits 12 candidates against each other.
These candidates qualified for these elections by obtaining the support of 500 mayors and/or local councilors from all over the country.
If no candidate wins 50% of the vote in the first round, the two contenders with the most votes will proceed to a second round two weeks later, on Sunday, April 24.
Of the 12 candidates in the race, IFOP polls suggest only five have ever garnered more than 10% of voter support.
A second round of voting is almost guaranteed.
This isn't the only national vote France faces this year, either: parliamentary elections are due to take place in June.
Who is running for office?
French President Emmanuel Macron speaks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at a December 2019 summit. Macron has taken a leadership role in trying to avert war in Ukraine.
The owner
First-term President Emmanuel Macron has only stood for election once, his successful 2017 presidential bid, and has had a mixed record going into 2022. Considering that no incumbent French president has won re-election since Jacques Chirac in 2002, his is a difficult place to be, although he is the favourite.
A former investment banker and alumnus of some of France's most elite schools, Macron provoked anger across the country with a diesel tax early in his term, sparking the gilets jaunes movement, one of the longest-running protests. the country has seen in decades.
"Today's popularity rating is important," political commentator Jean-Michel Aphatie told CNN.
"The level of hatred towards Emmanuel Macron is considerable and shared."
Internationally, his attempts to win over Donald Trump, prevent the AUKUS submarine deal, and his unsuccessful diplomatic efforts to prevent war in Ukraine were arguably failures.
But Macron's full backing for an ambitious and autonomous European Union has earned him respect abroad and established his geopolitical credentials at home.
The most unexpected challenge of his presidency, covid-19, may have defined his time in office.
More than two years of lockdowns and mask orders, a failed EU vaccine launch and the bold move to effectively force the French to get vaccinated have sparked notable opposition, even as most of the country learned to live with with the realities of the virus and a calm majority supported the measures.
Macron has refused to debate his opponents and has barely campaigned.
While his top position in his race was never really threatened, experts believe his strategy has been to avoid political turmoil as long as possible in order to portray himself as the most presidential of all the candidates.
But a week before the first vote, Macron urged his supporters to avoid complacency.
"Anything is possible," he told them, warning of the possibility of a Brexit-style setback in the election.
Marine Le Pen speaks at a campaign event in Reims, France, on February 5.
the challenger
"French electoral logic means that in the second round, you have to be the least hated of the two remaining candidates," Etienne Girard, editor of L'Express magazine, told CNN.
While France's first round casts votes from across the political spectrum, in the second round many vote as much to keep a candidate out of office as to elect his opponent.
That has been a problem for Marine Le Pen, who has been synonymous with the French far right for much of the last decade.
Now an MP for the region of Calais, the gateway to the UK that has struggled to deal with migrants heading to Britain, the anti-immigrant Le Pen ran against Macron in 2017 but lost by a sizable margin.
His father, fellow far-right agitator Jean-Marie Le Pen, also lost in the second round, in his case to Chirac in 2002.
Marine Le Pen's strategy for this election was originally one of winning mainstream support, "a strategy of respectability," as Girard describes it.
While he remains strongly anti-immigrant, his softening of tone around iconic issues like Islam and Euroscepticism, especially since Brexit, has been widely touted as an effort to win over voters outside his far-right base.
Still, "curbing uncontrolled immigration" and "eradicating Islamist ideologies" are the top two priorities in his manifesto.
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Marine Le Pen at the Moscow Kremlin on March 24, 2017.
For an admirer of Vladimir Putin -- a photo of her visiting the Russian president appears in a discarded campaign brochure -- the war in Ukraine has raised uncomfortable questions for Le Pen.
However, in the final weeks of the campaign, she put the cost of living front and center on her platform, promising measures that she says will put "150 to 200 euros" back into the pockets of every household, including the promise of increase the sales tax on 100 household items.
Le Pen is known for targeting hard-to-reach voters, according to pollster Emmanuel Riviere.
"She always manages to seduce people who are not interested in politics at all, precisely because she offers them a solution to express their anger towards politics," she told CNN.
Currently, Le Pen is much higher in the polls than she was in the 2017 elections. With days to go before the first round, IFOP polls suggest that she could win 47% of the vote in a second round against Macron.
Far-right candidate Eric Zemmour addresses activists at a campaign rally in Lille, northern France, on February 5.
new ends
The new kid on the block, far-right TV pundit and author Eric Zemmour, had long been touted as a possible presidential candidate.
Known for his uncompromising stances on Islam, children with non-French names and immigration, he has twice been convicted of inciting racial or religious hatred.
As a presidential candidate, he has doubled down on his race-based rhetoric, promoting the racist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory in his speeches and promising a "ministry for re-immigration" to deport up to 1 million descendants of Northern Africa.
The theory holds that the immigrants want to "replace" the native French population.
Zemmour enjoyed a seat among the top three candidates until March, according to an IFOP poll, challenging the dominance of the far-right political Le Pen family.
The candidate openly cites Islam as a danger threatening France and has drawn a more educated and affluent demographic to the political extreme, according to Riviere.
Well read and a gifted speaker, his call to "save our homeland, our civilization, our culture" has struck a chord with some.
"People, when they sit in front of their televisions and listen to him, feel that they are being elevated. And that, in France, is something that is greatly expected of a political leader," said Girard, who has also written a biography of Zemmour. .
Ultimately, however, he is stepping on Le Pen.
"They are really in direct competition with each other because their confrontation can make them lose a lot with one or the other," Riviere said.
Zemmour, who proudly confessed in 2018 that he "dreamed" of a French Putin, has seen his popularity decline since the war in Ukraine began.
Zemmour was publicly convinced that Putin would never invade and then continued to defend him even after he did.
Zemmour has since condemned the invasion, something of a U-turn in his support for the Russian president.
Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon is currently third in the polls ahead of the first round of presidential elections on Sunday.
external opportunities
In Jean-Luc Melenchon, the French ultra-left also has its incendiary politician.
The leader of the "Untamed France" party, veteran activist and politician Melenchon, has so far run in three presidential contests.
Among his flagship policies are a "fiscal revolution", a radical rethinking of the French government towards more direct involvement of the electorate and a €1 billion plan to combat violence against women, a hot topic in France.
But without a unifying candidate, the French left seems unlikely to compete for a place in the second round.
Melenchon has a loyal base among far-left voters but has struggled to win over more centrist voters.
Both Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris and presidential candidate for the leftist Socialist Party, and Valerie Pecresse, of the right-wing Republican Party, have struggled to make headway in the polls, a damning indictment of mainstream French politics.
Their movements suffered from the creation of Macron's centrist "La Republique En Marche" party in 2016, and have yet to recover.
And while Macron may be in the lead as French voters prepare to head to the polls, April may have surprises in store.
"In this country, anything is possible. We have seen the impossible come true in other countries," political commentator Aphatie said.
"Donald Trump elected? Never."
What do the polls say?
Macron is in the lead, according to an IFOP poll, which suggests his support levels have not fallen below 24% since January and rose to a high of 31% in the first weeks of the war in Ukraine.
Similarly, Marine Le Pen has held onto second place for almost the last three months, peaking at 21% at the end of March, according to IFOP.
All of which would seem to set up a repeat of the 2017 runoff. But while Macron took almost two-thirds of the vote last time, IFOP polls suggest that a showdown between Macron and Le Pen this year could result in the incumbent get 53% of the vote against 47% for Le Pen, a much less comfortable margin of victory for Macron.
What are the biggest problems for French voters?
The cost of living is one of the main topics for the French electorate this year.
Facing the economic fallout from the pandemic, high energy prices and the war in Ukraine, voters are feeling the effects, despite generous government support.
While financial pressures may not be enough to mask the extremism of some candidates in the minds of voters, they may push some to seek unorthodox answers to their problems.
Public servants are preparing election materials to mail to voters, less than a week before the first round of France's presidential election.
The fighting in Ukraine is a far cry from the bistros and cafes of France, but the conflict is certainly on the minds of voters.
Barely 90% of the French were worried about the war in the last week of March, according to IFOP.
Given the spotty track record of challengers taking on Putin, this is likely to play in Macron's favor.
Notably absent from the debate has been the environmental crisis.
Although the importance of climate protection has gained momentum globally, France derived 75% of its electricity needs in 2020 from nuclear power, according to the French Ministry of the Environment.
Since most of the candidates support the type of nuclear development that Macron has already announced, there is little divergence on this issue.
For all the fanfare these elections once promised, with a war on the European Union border and many voters struggling to pay their bills, France's election may now rest more in the coming months than in the next five. years.
Emmanuel Macron Marine Le Pen