The Ipsos Sopra-Steria poll published on Monday showed Mr Macron’s La Republique en Marche (LREM) movement with 23 percent of voting intentions, while Mrs Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) — formerly the Front National — was seen winning 21 percent of the French vote. The French daily Le Monde, which commissioned the survey, said the poll showed that France’s “political landscape is surprisingly divided,” with centrist and far-right movements obliterating traditional left- and right-wing parties. Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen have successfully cemented a commanding lead over their political rivals, the poll showed.
The conservative Les Républicains party was seen winning just 12 percent of voting intentions and the leftist La France Insoumise around eight percent.
The poll of 10,002 people, conducted between February 15-21, asked respondents who they would vote for if the European elections were to be held the following Sunday.
But despite his party’s strong position in polls for the crunch May vote, Mr Macron remains relatively unpopular back home, where he has been the target of a months-long working class revolt that has undermined his authority and derailed his reform plans.
Some 36 percent of those polled said that they would be voting in the parliamentary election to express their opposition to Mr Macron and his government, whose liberal economic policies are seen as favouring the urban elite over the rural poor.
However, only 22 percent of French people think that Mrs Le Pen would be a “better” president than Mr Macron.
The far-right chief lost the presidential election to the 41-year-old centrist by a landslide in May 2017.
Mr Macron defeated Mrs Le Pen by 66 percent to 34 percent. The election blow forced the French far-right to tone done its anti-EU stance and retract its call for a so-called Frexit, or French exit from the Brussels bloc.
There are just three months to go until the European elections, which are shaping up to be the most divisive since they were first held in 1979.
Far-right and populist parties are expected to win up to a third of the seats.
Ms Le Pen has repeatedly urged Europe’s populist parties to unite against a liberal establishment in the vote.
The staunch sovereignist wants Brussels to hand back powers to member states, an outcome europhiles say would trigger a collapse of the political and monetary union.
Mr Macron, for his part, has pitched the May 23-26 vote as an open battle between anti-immigrant, far-right populists like Mrs Le Pen’s RN and pro-Europe progressives like himself.
A populist take-over in the EU parliament would allow eurosceptic politicians to dictate the bloc’s most powerful executive body, the European Commission, and enable them to disrupt the status quo.