France preferred the continuity of the centrist Emmanuel Macron in the Elysée Palace to the rupture of the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, whose victory would have been a real political earthquake in France and in Europe. The French said yes to Macron’s Europeanism and progressivism and rejected Le Pen’s Euroscepticism and ultra-nationalism.
Macron, 44, was re-elected president of the French Republic for five more years with 58.2% of the vote, compared to 46% for his opponent, according to the scrutiny of the French Ministry of the Interior.
According to the experts, abstention would stand at 28.2%, which would be a record, if that figure is confirmed. In 2017, there was an abstention of 25.4%.
Macron’s victory, which all the polls had predicted for months, was, however, less comfortable than in 2017. Five years ago, the candidate of La República en Marcha defeated Le Pen by 66.10% compared to 33.9 % of votes of the candidate for National Regrouping, formerly called the National Front. And he became at the age of 39 the youngest president of France.
Of the 12 candidates who started the race for the Elysée Palace, only two, Macron and Le Pen, managed to qualify for the second round, as they were the most voted candidates. The rest of the candidates were eliminated in the first round.
The centrist candidate voted together with his wife, Brigitte Macron, in the spa town of Le Touquet, while Le Pen did so in Hénin-Beaumont. Both towns are located in the north of France, 120 kilometers apart.
Macron, candidate of The Republic on the Move, wins the elections, but the extreme right advances in France. In the 2002 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right National Front party and father of Marine Le Pen, obtained only 17.79% of the vote, compared to 82.21% for Jacques Chirac. Marine Le Pen, who was running for a presidential election for the third time, got 41.8%, a historic result for the French extreme right.
Chirac swept the 2002 elections thanks to the so-called “republican front”: all the republican parties gave the slogan of voting for Chirac to prevent the extreme right from coming to power in France.
This “Republican front” is no longer as solid as it was 20 years ago. For example, the leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the third most voted candidate in the first round, did not explicitly ask for the vote for Macron in the second round. Although he asked his voters not to cast “a single vote for Mrs. Le Pen”, he left the door open for them to abstain or vote blank or null.
Macron’s victory ends a strange election campaign, overshadowed by the Ukrainian war. Macron, busy mediating between Moscow and kyiv and the French presidency of the European Union, officially announced his candidacy in March. He wanted to be “president until the last quarter of an hour.” He refused to debate his opponents before the first round. But he did it with Le Pen between the two rounds and won the presidential debate.
These elections have made it clear that Marine Le Pen’s far-right party is no longer as scary as it was when her father led the National Front. Marine Le Pen is not Jean-Marie Le Pen. And National Regrouping is not the National Front.
In order not to scare the electorate less ultra and to attract voters, Le Pen emphasized in the electoral campaign the loss of purchasing power and the problems of many of his compatriots to make ends meet, one of the greatest concerns of the French .
The ultra Éric Zemmour, who at the beginning of his campaign seemed to threaten his leadership on the extreme right, in the end served as a “lightning rod” for criticism and helped to whiten his image. At his side, it seemed more moderate, although if one carefully read the Regrouping National program it is clear that it is still a party of the extreme right.
There was unrelenting nationalism, a hard line on immigration, her desire to establish a national preference for jobs and state aid, the promise to ban the Islamic veil in the street if she was elected, the link she made between immigration and crime and the confusion between Islam and Islamism.
The strategy of “demonization” of the party that Marine Le Pen undertook when she took the reins has worked, however, to a certain extent. She is voted for by more French people than five years ago, but she still hasn’t won a presidential election. The leader of the extreme right has not managed to break the glass ceiling. If she had, she would have made history by becoming France’s first female president and the first far-right.
The turnout rate at 5 p.m. in the second round of the French presidential election was 63.23%, two points lower than in the 2017 election, according to data from the French Ministry of the Interior.
On April 10, the day on which the first round of the French presidential elections was held, the participation rate at the same time reached 65%.
In the second round of the 2017 presidential elections, the participation rate at five in the afternoon was 65.3%. And in 2012, it was 71.96% at the same time, the Interior Ministry recalled in a statement.
The same opponents as five years ago on the ballot, the absence of a real electoral campaign, the feeling that everything has already been decided in advance and the fact that the second round of the presidential elections coincided with the school holidays meant that finally fewer French will go to the polls than in 2017.
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