The latest polls showed Macron with a comfortable lead, north of 20 percent. He is an independent who founded a new party, “En Marche!” (Onward!), and cast himself as a level-headed centrist and as the race’s true outsider. But after the upset victory of the Brexit campaign in Britain and of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election, even those who envision the defeat of Le Pen’s populist insurgency have stayed mostly mum, almost as though not to jinx the result.

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And with as much as 32 percent of the electorate expected to withhold support from both candidates, according to polling conducted by Cevipof, a political research center attached to Sciences Po in Paris, certainty would be misplaced, particularly with late-breaking surprises.

In Laon, the capital of a region hit hard by the flight of mining and then textile jobs, voters awoke to rain and thick fog. Slowly, almost grudgingly, they made their way to the polls.

Some voiced fervent support for Le Pen and her promise to return France to prosperity, though they were hardly confident she would win. A few were excited about the idea of a Macron presidency, saying someone with a background in finance could help modernize the economy and reinforce France’s position in Europe. More so, they were voting simply to halt Le Pen.

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“I have to,” said Stéphane Chartier, 43, who voted in the first round for François Fillon, the center-right politician whose candidacy was tarnished by a corruption scandal.

Most adamant, however, were those who refused to decide between the two, turning in blank ballots.

Gérard Tourneur, a retired teacher and a formal Socialist council member, said he watched last week’s debate between Macron and Le Pen, hoping he would hear something from either that would inspire him to lean in one direction or the other.

“Nothing came out,” Tourneur, 68, said. “We don’t know what Macron really thinks. He is a prisoner of the right because he will need them to govern. He will be like the queen of England, anointed but with little real authority.”

A young woman who declined to give her name, saying her political preferences were private, said she voted for Macron in the first round but, regretting it, cast a protest vote for neither candidate Sunday. Her friends had pressured her to make a strategic decision in the first round two weeks ago. After reading up on Macron, however, she said, she could find nothing in his platform that would avert France's economic deterioration.

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Gilles Nicolas, 62, had his heart set on Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who led Unbowed France in an alliance with the French Communists in the first round and declined to endorse Macron. Nicolas, who used to make cabinets, couldn’t bring himself to rally behind Macron, even though he “hates the ideas that Madame Le Pen represents.”

The phenomenon is not unique to the regions remote from France's urban centers. In Paris, Christianne Le Sausse, a 73-year-old retired cook, said the bitter campaign had left her dissatisfied with the two choices. She would abstain, she said, from “the war of politics.”