Asked about TF1, the president-candidate explained that he wanted to revalue pensions on inflation from the summer, “given the prices” which jumped due to the war in Ukraine.

He also promised to "maintain a shield for the price of gas and electricity" and to "maintain the rebate at the pump" if prices continue to rise.

Another immediate measure, granting this summer "for the self-employed, reductions in charges" and the possibility for companies to pay a bonus without charges or tax, up to a triple ceiling.

In an interview with Le Figaro, he also said he wanted to launch "major projects, school, health, retirement, autonomy, justice, from the first year".

And "for pensions, there will be a phase of consultation with the social partners. But the mandate is clear (...) it must be next fall", he maintained.

"I still have an intact energy, which allows me to do things in a clearer and clearer way than five years ago," assured Emmanuel Macron.

He also considered that "in the field of immigration, the results are insufficient", but "our country is not overwhelmed, as some claim, and + zero immigration + is neither realistic nor desirable “, he added.

He also wants to "facilitate the return to their country of origin of foreigners without residence permits".

"We have strengthened border protection and greatly tightened the conditions for entering our territory in a context where flows have increased considerably," he defended himself.

"A concern arose on this: I did not succeed in calming it, and it fed the extremes a lot", admitted Emmanuel Macron, about his promise of 2017 to lower the vote for the extremes.

He also felt that "the current fundamentals of the far right" - a term he systematically uses to talk about Marine Le Pen - "are always the same: the attacks and the rejection of the Republic, a basis for anti-Semitism - if not claimed at least cultivated -, a very clear xenophobia and a desire for ultra-conservatism".

The candidate excludes a dissolution of the National Assembly, which would bring forward the legislative elections "barely fifteen days" and could give "our compatriots the feeling that we would be playing with the electoral calendar".

For Emmanuel Macron, "the two former major republican parties have become parties of local elected officials".

“If I had to give a form of matrix or translation of what we have been doing since 2017, it is the regrouping of social democracy, the ecology of progress which refuses degrowth, the political center, the radicals, the Orleanist right and part of the liberal and Bonapartist right".

Asked about former LR President Nicolas Sarkozy, who did not support LR candidate Valérie Pécresse, Emmanuel Macron replied that "on the issue of work and merit, to take just one example, I find myself in what President Sarkozy defended".

© 2022 AFP