All 11 French presidential candidates will take part in a live debate scheduled to run over three and a half hours of primetime television.
It will be the first time so many leadership hopefuls have taken part in such a programme and will be limited to three themes: how to create jobs, how to protect the French, and what social model do the candidates seek.
Participants are also expected to be asked how they would cleanup French political life after a series of damaging scandals. Two frontrunners, the conservative candidate François Fillon and the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen, are both facing fraud investigations over the misuse of public money.
The debate on Tuesday evening be moderated by two journalists, who will face a semi-circle of candidates – nine men and two women.
Candidates will be required to hand over their mobile phones after accusations that Fillon was receiving and sending text messages to his advisers during last month’s debate.
For many viewers it will be a chance to discover the six also-rans who stand little if any chance of winning the election, but whose first-round support on 23 April will be sought by the two candidates who go through to the second round two weeks later.
The five men and one woman include a Trotskyist and a politician who once accused the Queen of being an international drug dealer. Apart from one, all are polling 1% of votes or less.
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of the nationalist Debout La France (Arise France), is a friend and fan of Nigel Farage and supports a French exit from the EU.
François Asselineau, head of the rightwing Union Populaire Républicaine and a former tax inspector, also wants to leave the EU and Nato and thinks Le Pen is too moderate on questions of sovereignty.
Philippe Poutou is a union leader at a Ford car plant and is head of the New Anticapitalist party whose slogan is “Our lives not their profits”. He suggests scrapping the post of president.
Jean Lassalle, almost unknown even in France, is an MP and since 1977 has been mayor of a tiny hamlet of 160 inhabitants in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques area. He is descended from mountain shepherds. He proposes a vigorous defence of rural areas and a return to compulsory national service as well as a “Europe of nations”.
Jacques Cheminade wants to colonise Mars and industrialise the moon, has likened Barack Obama to Hitler and accused Queen Elizabeth of being involved in international drug trafficking. His party, Solidarité et Progrès, is the French branch of the US’s far-right LaRouche movement. In 2005, his party was listed as a “political sect”.
Nathalie Arthaud, the head of the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle) party, is a part-time teacher in one of Paris’s troubled banlieues. She wants a minimum wage of €1,800 (£1,540) net a month.
According to the daily Paris Match/Ifop poll, independent candidate Emmanuel Macron remains the frontrunner at 26%, a fraction ahead of Le Pen with 25%. Fillon’s support has dropped to 17%, followed by hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon at 15% and the Socialist party candidate, Benoît Hamon, at 10%.
An Opinionway poll has Le Pen leading with 26%, Macron at 24% and Fillon 20%. Most opinion polls suggest Le Pen and Macron will go through to the second vote.
