Polling stations opened in France at 8 a.m. for the second round of presidential elections. Some 48.7 million voters have been called on to choose between incumbent President Emmanuel Macron (44) and far-right leader Marine Le Pen (53).
The French Ministry of the Interior will provide the first figures on the turnout at 12:00 noon. There is a fear of a decline. In the first round of elections, 73.69 percent of eligible voters turned up, the lowest percentage in 20 years. Emmanuel Macron is the favorite for a second term, but experts say Le Pen is more likely than ever to win.
The French face a historic choice: to reappoint the outgoing president or elect a woman, which would be a first, and so propel the far right into the Elysée for a political landslide that will reverberate far beyond French borders, akin to Brexit in Great Britain and the 2016 election of Donald Trump in the United States.
Center candidate Macron of the party La Republique en Marche (LREM) received the most votes of the twelve candidates in the first round: it came in at 27.85 percent. Candidate Le Pen of the extreme right party National Assembly (RN), the former National Front, followed closely behind with 23.15 percent. The winner of the second round will become the new president of France for the next five years. According to many polls, that duel is going to be quite exciting.
President Macron was still at 30 percent of the vote in the polls in mid-March. This was mainly ‘thanks to’ the war in Ukraine: the French felt unsafe and sided with their president. But after that, his popularity declined. However, last Thursday’s polls gave Macron 55.5 to 56.5 percent of the vote.
Overseas Territories
In the French overseas territories, the second round of the presidential elections was already voted on Saturday. Residents of the small island region of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, off the coast of Canada, already went to the polling station on Saturday morning local time. This was followed by French Guiana, a neighboring country of Suriname, and the French islands in the Antilles, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
The overseas territories voted earlier because of the time difference with France. There, at midnight on Friday, the election campaign of Macron and Le Pen officially came to an end. Meetings, handing out pamphlets and other activities to win over voters are no longer allowed on the day before the election.
The first polls in France close at 7 p.m. on Sunday, in the major cities at 8 p.m.
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