The finalists in France’s most turbulent election in decades have hit the campaign trail for the last time, visiting cathedrals at opposite ends of the country before 47 million voters choose their next president on Sunday.

The favourite, Emmanuel Macron, a former banker and economy minister running as an independent centrist, was in the south-western town of Rodez, where he shook hands and took selfies before ducking into the 16th-century cathedral.

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His rival, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, was booed by a few dozen protesters as she visited the 800-year-old cathedral of Reims, northern France, where 25 French kings were crowned in the Middle Ages.

After being hustled to her car by bodyguards, she complained about her treatment on Twitter. “Monsieur Macron’s supporters act with violence everywhere, even in ... a symbolic and sacred place. No dignity,” she said.

Five polls released on Friday and conducted the day after the pair faced off in an acrimonious televised debate showed Macron on track to win between 61.5% and 62%, his best score since winning the first round vote on 23 April.

Pollsters said the gap between the two rivals had widened by as much as three points following Le Pen’s performance, widely criticised for attacking and mocking her opponent rather than engaging with policies.

The election has turned the country’s politics upside down, with neither of the two mainstream centre-right and centre-left movements that have governed France since the second world war making it into Sunday’s final run off.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police officers walk past the Eiffel tower, which sports the banner placed by Greenpeace activists. Photograph: Michel Euler/AP

Seen as the most important election in many years for France and for the EU, it pits two candidates against each other who have diametrically opposing visions for the future of their country and the continent.

Macron, who says he is “neither left nor right”, founded his En Marche! movement barely a year ago and is liberal, globally minded and upbeat. Le Pen, protectionist and anti-immigration, wants to close France’s borders and exit the euro.

In minor security scares on the final day of campaigning, police arrested a suspected Islamic radical at an air base in Normandy, while the Paris police chief called emergency pre-polling day security talks after Greenpeace activists climbed the Eiffel Tower and unfurled a large banner of France’s national motto: liberté, egalité, fraternité.

Macron told French radio in two interviews that he had already decided who his prime minister would be if he won – but did not name any names – and that his first priority, if elected, would be to “ensure the country keeps its balance”.

Le Pen conceded she had been forceful in Wednesday’s debate, but insisted that her words were “only the echo of the social violence that is going to explode in this country ... The real aggressiveness is that of Mr Macron’s plan.”

Underlining how keenly the poll is being watched in Europe, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said in Hamburg that the EU needed to “move ahead faster and more decisively” and that Sunday’s election in France “is of decisive significance in this context”.

The candidates also announced their venues for their planned victory celebrations: Macron opted for the Esplanade du Louvre in central Paris and Le Pen for the Chalet du Lac, originally a hunting lodge used by emperor Napoleon III in the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern edge of the capital.