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At one point incumbent president Emmanuel Macron seemed destined to win the first round of voting this Sunday. However polls suggest the race has tightened up significantly. Sophie Pedder, Paris bureau chief for the Economist newspaper, tells us about the economic concerns that voters have.

Also in the programme, independent Russian media outlets have all but disintegrated since the invasion of Ukraine. We speak to Dmitri Yelovskiy, deputy editor of the now-closed independent Russian news TV channel TV Dozhd, who fled Russia for Lithuania on Monday.

A special report from Ajit Niranjan in Germany investigates how the country is coping since the cancellation of the Nordstream 2 pipeline of gas from Russia. And finally, a SpaceX rocket with the world's first-ever all private astronaut team takes off from Florida today. British space journalist, Kate Arkless-Gray, explains why this is so significant.

(Photo: French president Emmanuel Macron at a campaign rally, Credit: Ludovic Marin/Getty Images)