It is almost six years to the day since Marine Le Pen went head to head with Emmanuel Macron in a live television debate that came to be seen as the defining moment of the 2017 French presidential campaign.

It did not end well for the leader of the National Front, the party she has since rebranded as the National Rally. Le Pen was ripped apart by her young opponent on the evening of May 3. Macron combined boyish charm with a head for facts, outmanoeuvring Le Pen in every argument and on every subject.

It’s increasingly hard to find anyone in France who respects their president.

Le Pen was accused of being too aggressive and too personal, as encapsulated in her opening statement. ‘Monsieur Macron,’ she announced to the 16.5 million viewers, ‘is the candidate of unbridled globalisation, of Uberisation, of hardship, of social brutality, of the war of all against all, of the economic ransacking of our big groups, of the dismemberment of France by the big economic interests.’

It turns out that was a fairly accurate depiction of France in 2023.

How long ago it seems since Macron celebrated becoming the youngest president of the Fifth Republic with a regal strut across the courtyard of the Louvre to the tune of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. After five calamitous years of Francois Hollande, Macron brought hope, optimism and energy to the Republic. ‘I know about our disagreements,’ he declared to an exultant crowd. ‘I will respect them.’

Six years later it’s increasingly hard to find anyone in France who respects their president. Taxi drivers, market traders, shop keepers, elderly neighbours, young waitresses – they all make a face when I mention the ‘M’ word. Last week I dined in a chic restaurant in a chic arrondissement of Paris with a friend who was over from England. The owner was in his late 30s, an entrepreneur with get up and go, but when, as he served our digestifs, I raised the subject of his president, his lip curled: ‘What a catastrophe!’ he muttered.

Opinion polls bear out this view. The most recent disclosed that 70 per cent of French people believe their president is doing a bad job. Le Pen, on the other hand, has negotiated the 11 months since she achieved a spectacular political breakthrough – by winning 89 seats in the parliamentary elections – with finesse. There have been no scandals, no blunders and no inflammatory rhetoric. Compared to some far-left MPs in recent months, Le Pen has been a model of restraint in the National Assembly, a point made by Olivier Dussopt, the Minister of Labour, who remarked that ‘she has been more Republican that a lot of others.’

No wonder then that Le Pen’s approval rating is at a record high of 34 per cent. That’s the good news for the leader of the National Rally. The bad news is that Édouard Philippe, Macron’s first pick as Prime Minister, has a rating of 40 per cent.

Philippe led the government from May 2017 to 2020. He steered the country through the Yellow Vest crisis and then the arrival of Covid, earning plaudits for his suave and steady style of leadership. In one opinion poll, published in late June 2020, Philippe topped a list of political figures presented to the French as future leaders; 45 per cent of the public believed he was the man ‘to reinvent France’. Macron was ninth in the list. Less than a week later, Philippe was gone, replaced as PM by the charisma free Jean Castex. No one steals the limelight from Macron.

In a recent book the journalist Ludovic Vigogne described the breakdown of the relationship between Philippe and Macron and claimed that ‘a real hatred’ now exists between the pair.

Philippe now runs his own party, the centre-right Horizons, a role he combines with the mayorship of Le Havre. There’s little doubt he will run for the presidency in 2027, and evidently Le Pen has identified Philippe as her biggest threat.

In previous years, the French right have marked May Day with a ceremony in front of the statue of Jean of Arc in Paris; not this year. Instead Le Pen led her party to Le Havre to spend the first day of the month ‘among their people’, by which they meant the hard-working blue-collar workers of the port. Philippe didn’t take kindly to that remark, accusing the National Rally of ‘arrogance’ in the way they barged into his fiefdom.

That minor spat is a sign of things to come, an indication that the National Rally intend to pitch the 2027 election campaign as a class struggle: the ‘haves’ against the ‘have nots’, the winners of globalisation versus the losers.

Philippe presents an easy target for Le Pen. He’s a friend of big business, a fan of the EU, a graduate of ENA, the finishing school for the French technocracy, which was also responsible for Macron, and in favour of raising the age of retirement to 67.

On the other hand, Philippe should be able to count on the support of Macron’s key demographic, the 17 million over 60s. In a recent interview Patrick Buisson, a former advisor of Nicolas Sarkozy, said 75 per cent of this generation voted for Macron in the second round of last year’s election because they associate Le Pen with ‘general conflagration, with the explosion of the suburbs, economic chaos and, now, social warfare with its “class against class” strategy.’

That sounds like a decent description of Macron’s France, and Le Pen’s strategy will be to portray Philippe as Macron 2.0; vote for him, she’ll say, and it will be a continuation of the chaos that has characterised France since 2017.

Phillipe has four years to put as much distance as possible between himself and his former boss.

For the moment the president remains Public Enemy Number One for Le Pen. ‘He wanted to get the country going, but he put it on hold,’ she crowed in her May Day speech to the party faithful in Le Havre. ‘Rarely has a president been so disconnected, so lonely, so besieged, but still so arrogant.’

Six years after her humiliation, Le Pen is savouring every moment of Macron’s floundering presidency.