LONDON — Britain's beleaguered centrists have found their champion — and they're sending the troops across the English Channel to help him win.

The new golden boy for the Liberal Democrats is Emmanuel Macron, whom opinion polls favor to win the French presidential election in early May over far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

The Lib Dems are so keen to taste some of the insurgent Macron's success that they are planning to send campaigners to France to assist his campaign and, hopefully, pick up some tips, party officials said.

“Some of our campaign field staff will go to France, will be based in their offices, see what they do, learn how they get out the vote — and then get out and do some campaigning,” said an official for the Lib Dems, who are enjoying a modest poll revival of their own on the back of their anti-Brexit, pro-EU stance.

Lib Dem leader Tim Farron is also set to appear alongside Macron at a campaign event due to be organized sometime in the next month by the Dutch liberal party D66, which made gains in March's elections and is set to join the next coalition government.

"We are learning all we can from Macron's campaign,” Farron told POLITICO. “He believes in a politics and a country that is open, tolerant and united, this is something that we share … I hope to support his campaign in any way I can in the weeks ahead.”

Dubbed the "French Tony Blair," Macron has attracted the attention of the former Labour prime minister.

Lib Dem officials view the rise of Macron — with his seamless knitting of free market economics, internationalism and social liberalism with an insurgent ‘drain the swamp,’ anti-establishment shtick — and the defeat of the far-right Geert Wilders in the Netherlands as evidence that there are plenty of voters who will back whichever party or candidate represents the clearest alternative to the nativist, populist right.

The party has form when it comes to international campaigning. A small number of officials were sent to support and learn from the campaigns of Justin Trudeau in Canada in 2015 and Hillary Clinton in the U.S. in 2016. During the latter, the party schooled itself in targeting bespoke campaign literature to particular groups of voters, a technique later used in their successful Richmond Park by-election campaign, a party official said.

D66 MP Kees Verhoeven confirmed plans for a pro-Macron event involving British and Dutch liberals, which the Lib Dems anticipate will take place ahead of the second round of the French election on May 7.

"The purpose, of course, is to show that there's not only Euroskepticism but also a lot of groups and people who are pro-European and optimistic about the possibility of the future of Europe,” Verhoeven said.

“After Brexit, after the Ukraine referendum [when Dutch voters rejected an EU-Ukraine Association Agreement], after Trump, everybody thought the European Union is going down ... But in our elections, we saw the pro-European parties were winning. Macron is also doing very well in France. The Lib Dems are gaining a lot of votes in the U.K. after Brexit, so we want to show that it's not only negativism about Europe but also positivism.”

Old Blair, New Blair

Other centrist forces in London are watching Macron closely.

Dubbed the "French Tony Blair," Macron has attracted the attention of the former Labour prime minister, whose new think-tank — the Institute for Global Change — was established last month with the goal of filling “the wide open space in the middle of politics.”

Blair has publicly stressed that the institute will not become a new centrist political party. But in private, close allies admit that the idea of a new party emerging around the time of the next British general election is being seriously considered.

With Theresa May’s Conservative Party resolute in its hard Brexit stance, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn declining to offer resistance to the triggering of Article 50 to take Britain out of the EU, and the Lib Dems a minuscule parliamentary force with just nine MPs, the question of whether a new party is needed to oppose Brexit has become a favorite topic in Westminster.

“The rejection of Wilders, Macron, it’s a bit of a renaissance” — Lib Dem official

While the Lib Dems publicly eschew such talk, Farron was contacted last summer by a close ally of former Tory Chancellor George Osborne, who suggested the creation of a centrist party called "The Democrats," the New Statesman reported. Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem former deputy prime minister, met with Blair in November, ahead of the creation of his new institute in March.

A Macron win, a person close to Blair said, would be galvanizing for U.K. centrists, offering evidence that a broad-based political movement, fuelled by social media, can grow quickly from the center, not just the populist right or left

“The barriers for a new movement are lower now,” this person said. “Despite jitters about a new political party ending up as another SDP, things feel different now.”

The fate of the SDP — the Social Democratic Party, which was founded in 1981 by four Labour centrists, was met with great expectation, but ultimately failed to make a major breakthrough — still haunts would-be founders of a new party.

But in Macron, whose appeal is as much about what he is against as what he is for, they see evidence that in a time of warring political ideologies, an insurgent centrist can rise up through the middle and sweep all before him.

“The rejection of Wilders, Macron, it’s a bit of a renaissance,” said one Lib Dem official. “After many years of so many of us being in retreat, it is nice to see.”

Naomi O’Leary contributed to this article.