Centrist independent is projected to win by 65.1% to 34.9% but defeat still marks historically high vote for France’s far right
The pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron has won the French presidency with a decisive victory over the far-right Marine Le Pen that his supporters hailed as holding back the tide of populism.
But Le Pen’s score nonetheless marked a historic high for the French far right. Despite a lacklustre campaign that ended with a calamitous performance in the final TV debate, she was projected to have taken more than 10 million votes, roughly double that of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, when he reached the presidential run-off in 2002. The anti-immigration, anti-EU Front National’s supporters asserted that the party has a central place as an opposition force in France.
Macron, who has never held elected office and was unknown until three years ago, is France’s youngest president. He will take over a country under a state of emergency, still facing a major terrorism threat and struggling with a stagnant economy after decades of mass unemployment. France is also divided after an election campaign in which anti-establishment anger saw the traditional left and right ruling parties ejected from the race in the first round for the first time since the period after the second world war.
Turnout was projected to have been the lowest in more than 40 years. Macron’s victory came not only because voters supported his policy platform for free market, pro-business reform, and his promises to energise the EU coupled with a leftwing approach to social issues. Some of his voters came from other parties across the political spectrum and turned out not in complete support of his programme, but to stop the Front National.
In a political landscape with a strong hard-left and far-right, Macron now faces the challenge of trying to win a parlimentary majority for his fledgeling centrist political movement En Marche! (On the Move!) in legislative elections next month. Without a majority, he will not be able to carry out his manifesto promises.
After the UK’s vote to leave the European Union and the US vote for the political novice Donald Trump as president, the French presidential race was the latest election to shake up establishment politics by kicking out the figures that stood for the status quo — ejecting the mainstream parties that have dominated French politics for 50 years and leaving the political novice Macron to do battle with the far-right.
Macron’s victory comes after a bitter campaign with Le Pen in which she accused him of being part of an elite that didn’t understand every day people and he said Le Pen represented the “party of hatred” that wanted “civil war” in France. The run-off had pitted Macron, France’s most europhile candidate, against Le Pen, the most europhobe.
Hours before the end of campainging on Friday night, Macron’s campaign was hacked and Paris prosecutors are investigating. Hundreds of thousands of emails and documents were dumped online and then spread by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, in what the candidate called an attempt at “democratic destabilisation”.
Macron, a former investment banker and senior civil servant, who grew up in a bourgeois family in Amiens, had served as deputy chief of staff to the Socialist president François Hollande but was not part of the Socialist party.
In 2014, Hollande appointed him economy minister but he left government in 2016, complaining pro-business reforms weren’t going far enough. A year ago, he formed a political movement En Marche! (On the move!) promising to shake-up France’s “vacuous” and discredited political class.
He campaigned on pledges to ease labour laws, boost education in deprived areas and extend new protections to the self-employed.
The French election race was an extraordinary run of twists and turns. Hollande became the first president since the war to decide not to run again for office after slumping to record unpopularity with a satisfaction rating of only 4%. His troubled five-year term left France still struggling with a sluggish economy and a mood of disillusionment with the political class. The country is more divided than ever before. More than 230 people have been killed in terrorist attacks in little more than two years, as the political class questions Islam’s place in French society, and more than 3 million people are unemployed.
The right-wing candidate François Fillon, one seen as a favourite, was badly damanged by a judicial investigation into a string of corruption allegations, including that he had paid his wife and children generous salaries from public funds for fake parliamentary assistant jobs. The ruling Socialist party, under its candidate, the left-wing former rebel minister, Benoît Hamon, saw its score plunge to 6% while the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon soared to third place,
The Macron-Le Pen final marks a redrawing of the political divide, away from the old left-right divide towards a contest between a liberal, pro-globalisation stance and “close the borders” nationalism. Le Pen has styled her election campaign as between her party’s “patriots” and the “globalists” she says Macron represents.
