The war in the east means that all reports from western Europe degenerate into marginal notes.

But the presidential elections taking place in France this weekend will also shape Europe's future - and if the polls are to be believed, Emmanuel Macron's lead over the right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen is threateningly shrinking.

After Le Pen and the other far-right candidate, ex-journalist Eric Zémmour, split the right-wing electorate into evenly-matched camps, Macron's election victory seemed certain.

But now Zémmour, who did his opponent the favor of appearing downright moderate with his strident anti-Muslim campaign and numerous outbursts, has fallen far behind.

Le Pen and the left Jean-Luc Mélenchon are catching up strongly.

Both are considered opponents of the European Union in its current form.

The first horror scenario that no one among Europa and Macron supporters wants to address is: In the first ballot on Sunday, Le Pen and Mélenchon surprisingly manage to position themselves ahead of Macron.

The second is: Macron loses in the runoff on April 24th.

Macron has made many mistakes – he has scrapped his planned banlieue bailout program and replaced it with meager neoliberal help-to-self activities, costing him many votes.

After the shelling of Chernobyl by Putin's troops, his idea of ​​many decentralized small nuclear power plants seems even more crazy than before.

Unlike 2017, when Macron beat Le Pen with 66 percent,

According to surveys, the two are only six percentage points apart.

Almost a third of all French say they are still undecided.

Image politics decides

How desperately all campaign managers are poking around in the fog of this indecisiveness can be seen from the candidates' appearances: at a moment when all arguments have been exchanged, it is above all the image politics that can decide on the election.

Zémmour looks down aggressively and head-on from gloomy election posters, as if he wants to check each voter individually to see whether their existence is consistent with Zémmour's slogan "So that France remains France".

Le Pen clearly stands out: in front of a sunny forest of leaves, she smiles into the distance in a white blazer;

the picture wants to communicate a more relaxed optimism and is intended to win over voters in the middle class, who previously found it too radical and sinister.

The slogan "Immigration - It's up to you

Macron has changed the slogan under his photo on the posters, replacing "Macron avec vous" - "Macron with you" with the more inclusive shorthand "Nous tous" - "All of us".

It is a gentle form of "L'état, c'est moi": I am all of us - and because we all are me, there can be no other.

The left-wing candidate Mélenchon countered this semiotically underpinned central power of the president with a spectacular trick: During his election campaign appearances, he had himself projected as a hologram in eleven different cities.

Like a Marian apparition, a genie in a bottle, Mélenchon suddenly appears on the dark stages of the country, as if he could beam himself anywhere.

Mélenchon's holograms also live on the enthusiasm for technology from France's glorious post-war decades, which brought the country the TGV, Concorde and Minitel.

But skeptics can also see in his omnipresence coup a picture of the increasing illusion of politics in the age of the metaverse: the closer you get to the politician, the clearer it becomes that it is just a mirage, a tech bluff.

Macron can only hope that the spook will fizzle out politically in time.