The far-right National Front candidate, anti-immigrant, anti-capitalist Marine Le Pen, is the other finalist but her first round score (21.3 per cent, behind Macron's 24 per cent) was less than expected and lower than her polling over the past two years.

As well, numerous senior political figures from the left and right have called for a vote against Le Pen, while she has announced she will stand as an independent in the run-off – tacitly acknowledging the handicap of the 19th century-sounding National Front moniker, still associated for many voters with the anti-semitism of Le Pen's father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The dynamic, then, is with Macron.

The campaign has a way to go, of course, and Le Pen is an experienced operator; Macron is a political novice. But Macron, 39, has established a new political movement ("En Marche!" – on the move) from the ground up in just 12 months. Le Pen's refrain, that he represents merely an extension of the two-party system that has "failed" France for the past 30 years, looks scant and unlikely to wash with voters.

Nevertheless, Le Pen secured a record 7.6 million votes on April 23, adding about one million to her tally in the 2012 presidential election. She could reach, say, 38 per cent of the vote next weekend, according to Ipsos opinion polling. In short, there's no denying the extraordinary electoral progress the National Front has made in recent years.

Somewhat lost in the noise around Macron's rise was that the first choice of more than four in 10 French voters was a populist. Behind Le Pen, hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon – another anti-European, anti-system crusader – scored 19.6 per cent (a ragtag band of Trotskyists and "sovereignty" candidates accounted for a further 7 per cent).

Also significant is the extent to which the Macron-Le Pen breakthrough decimated the traditional French party-political landscape, leaving the mainstream right divided, and the Socialist Party of outgoing President François Hollande ruthlessly pulled apart from the right, by Macron, and the left, by Mélenchon. Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon secured just 6.3 per cent of the vote.

From these scattered ashes, a president Macron would seek to build a reform program in a country screaming for substantive change but whose numerous recent attempts have ended in tears. Macron doesn't actually have a party at this stage, in the traditional sense of sitting parliamentarians, mayors or an established network of party officials. And French parliamentary elections are in June.

Here's an emblematic example of how hard reforming France has become. Economy minister for two years, Macron pinned his colours to the mast of a modest reform package, the headline measure of which enabled local mayors to let shops open on 12 Sundays a year instead of five, as well as such blindingly, audacious game-changers as deregulating intercity coach services. The Socialists rebelled in such a blaze at the so-called "Macron law" that it had to be pushed through the parliament without a vote (via a special constitutional clause).

Macron is right to be modest in his policy program ambitions. France needs more than he's proposing but numerous recent reform initiatives have come hopelessly asunder, the underlying reason as much cultural as economic: the low level of public trust in the political elite. The best to hope for, perhaps, is that Macron can progress France on some limited, quantifiable criteria – regarding the rigid labour market, for example. Based on that amelioration, he (or another president) can, over a second five-year mandate, make the kind of substantial change France so sorely needs.

The populist surge in this election – opening a Pandora's box on any number of technicolour utopias – shows that it's a quarter to midnight on France'sreform clock. If first-round results are confirmed and Macron, the liberal independent totally unknown to the French public just three years ago, becomes president, it will be tantamount to revolution in a country that has known a few of them – this time, thankfully, via the ballot box. Should a president Macron then fail to deliver over the next five years, Le Pen and the extremes will have an open boulevard before them.

Richard Ogier is an Australian journalist in Munich. He is a former embassy press attaché in Paris.