French President Emmanuel Macron celebrates after his victory in the French presidential election at the Champ de Mars in Paris on April 24, 2022. THOMAS COEX / AFP / Getty Images
France re-elected its centrist president, Emmanuel Macron, with a comfortable lead after a stubborn campaign, defeating far-right populist Marin Le Pen and reaffirming the country’s place in NATO and the European Union for the next five years.
The result was a success for a coalition of left-right voters who pledged to support the relatively unpopular Mr Macron as a way to block the anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic nationalism of Ms Le Pen’s National Party.
Mr Macron acknowledged these disgruntled strategic voters in his victory speech Sunday night.
“I want to thank them and I know I have a debt to them in the coming years,” he said. “We will have to be kind and respectful because our country is permeated by so many doubts, so many divisions.
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His victory strengthened European unity and the Western military alliance at a time when they were being tested by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ms Le Pen is a longtime defender of Vladimir Putin’s regime, who has vowed to reduce France’s role in NATO and the EU if elected, while Mr Macron was a key diplomatic player in talks with Russia and the armament of Ukrainian forces.
This re-election is a startling personal achievement for Mr Macron, a former banker who founded his political party before defeating Mrs Le Pen in 2017 to reach the presidency at just 39, promising to surpass ideological boundaries with the administration it was “neither right nor left”. He reduced unemployment and gave a strong response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but his alleged elitism fueled populist unrest, especially during yellow vests protests in 2018
In a concession speech, Ms Le Pen hailed her result as a “shattering victory” as she came closer to power than her party had ever had. The race revealed the growing widespread acceptance of Ms. Le Pen’s brand as extreme nationalism. She promised to ban the wearing of the hijab in public – a measure Macron said contradicted French universalism and would provoke a “civil war” – and promised a referendum to give French citizens priority over immigrants in housing and work.
In the midst of Russia’s war against Ukraine, she called for the withdrawal of France from NATO’s integrated military command, while urging the West to move closer to Mr Putin. This became a difficulty during the campaign, as Mr Macron tried to portray her as a puppet of the Kremlin, highlighting the millions her party had borrowed from a Russian bank.
As opinion polls remained limited after the first round of voting sent the run-off finalists, political leaders across the spectrum called on their supporters to support the incumbent president as barrage, or a dam, opposite the far right. Former Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy has backed Mr Macron, a former Socialist economy minister; Yannick Jado, the leading candidate for president of the environment, called for Macron’s strategic vote “without pleasure, but without hesitation”.
The leader of the French far-right party “National Unity” Marine Le Pen is waving his supporters after the results of the vote in the second round of the Pavillon d’Armenonville on April 24, 2022 in Paris. Ms Le Pen also hailed her result as a “crushing victory” as she came closer to power than her party had ever had before. Chesnot / Getty Images
This was the third time in 20 years that the French had been called to unite against Le Pen’s presidency in a runoff, and they were less and less willing to do so. In 2002, Jacques Chirac refused to debate Jean-Marie Le Pen, the father of the current candidate and founder of her party, before winning 82% of the vote. In 2017, Macron won 66% of the vote against Ms. Le Pen.
This time the dam showed more cracks. The first round of voting on 10 April revealed little enthusiasm for Mr Macron’s form of economic liberalism and pro-European foreign policy. Candidates from the far right and far left received a total of more than 50 per cent of the vote, roughly twice as many as Mr Macron.
Forecasts at the end of Sunday’s election showed Macron won 58.5% of the vote, compared to 41.5% for Ms Le Pen.
The long-term strategy of “demedonization” continued to improve Ms Le Pen’s position before the run-off vote. She has successfully softened her image by abandoning more radical proposals, such as an outspoken departure from the EU, and through symbolic gestures such as expelling her father from the party after he reiterated his claim that the Holocaust was a “detail of history”.
She it also courtesy working-class voters, focusing more on pocket issues, such as fuel tax cuts, and criticizing Mr Macron for his government’s affinity for big business, including his close ties to the US consulting firm McKinsey.
The candidacy of Eric Zemmour, an even more outspoken opponent of immigration at the head of a party called Reconquest !, further helped Ms. Le Pen’s moderate image. He received about 7 percent of the vote in the first round while warning of immigrants “replacing” France’s old population, a theory Ms Le Pen rejected.
A series of unpopular economic reforms by Mr Macron, including tax cuts in favor of the rich and a proposed increase in the retirement age, earned him the reputation of “president of the rich” and fueled Mrs Le Pen’s self-portrayal as a working class rostrum. .
With his sublime way of speaking and technocratic politics, Mr Macron is the perfect “populist lightning rod,” said Catherine Fieschi, a Paris-based director of Counterpoint, a political research and consulting firm and author of Population: The tyranny of authenticity and the rise of populism.
Faced with a choice between two well-known and widely disliked figures, many French voters abstained on Sunday. Initial estimates put turnout in the second round at 72 percent, the lowest since 1969.
Behind the counter of a wine shop where she works in Paris, Emma Brunant said that although the prospect of Le Pen’s presidency made her “sad” and “scared”, she could not be made to vote for any of the candidates. .
“You have one that is extremely right-wing and another that is available to every big industry,” she said.
With a Reuters report
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