Emmanuel Macron has urged voters to turn out on Sunday for the first round of the French presidential election, stressing the importance of giving him a clear mandate. Interviewed on morning radio, the president said he was surprised by the increasing tendency of people to ask what point there was in voting. “Is it useful? Yes. If I hadn’t had a real mandate five years ago I couldn’t have done what I have done. Only the vote gives that legitimacy,” he told France Inter. “Many people sign up to causes, petitions, movements … but don’t necessarily vote. Causes are important … but the profound changes we can make to society come when we vote.” Six days from the first round, which will select a final two candidates, polls are still suggesting Macron is favourite to win the first round and face Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally in the runoff on 24 April, a repeat of 2017. However, with Le Pen closing the first-round gap, at 22% against Macron’s 28.5% and the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon seven points behind her, political analysts and pollsters have said that the result is far from a foregone conclusion. Support for all far-right candidates is now running at about 35%. Macron admitted that during his five years in the Élysée, marked by the Covid pandemic and more recently the war in Ukraine, he had failed to persuade people to shun the political extremes. “I didn’t succeed in convincing people that the extreme right is not the answer,” he said. During the interview, Macron also reiterated his determination to reform the country’s pension system, a proposal that sparked more than a month of strikes in France in 2019-2020, the worst industrial action to hit the country since the previous attempt to reform pensions in 2010. If re-elected he said he would raise the retirement age from 62 to 65 apart from a few special exceptions and introduce a minimum pension of €1,100 (about £925) a month that would be index linked. “I want to defend the system … in which those in work pay the pensions of the retired. I want to defend this system, but we cannot carry on as things are. The system is in the red. Those on low pensions are struggling,” he said. “All those who tell you we can keep pensions as they are today are lying. Today on average, people don’t stop working at 62, they carry on until 63.5 years. And several million of our citizens – many of them women doing tough jobs – work until 67. There’s a kind of hypocrisy about this.” He has promised reforms of the health and education systems that have also raised hackles among workers. However, he said he was not planning to force 12-year-olds into apprenticeships as Mélenchon has claimed. “This is fake news,” he said. Macron said he was shocked by images of alleged massacres in Ukraine and called for more severe sanctions and “clear measures” against Moscow, saying there was clear evidence the Russian army had committed war crimes. Under election rules, campaigning will stop on Friday at midnight so candidates have until then to persuade French voters. The far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who is fourth or fifth in the polls has ramped up his anti-immigration rhetoric, pledging to expel 1 million foreigners if elected. The centre-right Les Républicains candidate Valérie Pécresse, currently polling at the same level, says voters need to revolt to avoid a Le Pen v Macron runoff, while the Socialist party’s Anne Hidalgo, currently languishing far down the polls, has urged those in the “leftwing family” to support her.