Outgoing head of state Emanuel Macron, as expected, prevailed in the first round of the presidential elections in France held yesterday Sunday, followed by the leader of the French far right Marin Le Pen, with whom he will face in the second and decisive round of the 24th announced much more ambiguous than in 2017.
Mr. Macron secured 28.1 to 29.5% of the vote, while Ms. Lepen secured 23.3% to 24.4%, according to calculations by four polling institutes (IFOP-Fiducial, OpinionWay, Elabe, Ipsos). . However, Agence France-Presse estimates that the outgoing president secured something more, around 30%, after a strange election campaign, which was overshadowed by the new coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
The two gladiators immediately called for a rally. Mr Macron thanked those of the unlucky candidates who called on their constituents to guarantee that the far right would be defeated. Ms. Lepen called on “all those who did not vote” for the outgoing centrist liberal president to “join” her.
Mr Macron said he was ready to set up a new structure to unite, regardless of “differences”, what he called a “broad political movement of unity and action”.
“President Macron!” Shouted, waving French and European flags, some a thousand enthusiastic supporters last night, relieved by the president’s performance, counting “one, two, and five more years.”
Radical left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Melanson came in third with around 20%, not much lower than Ms. Le Pen, according to research firms.
In view of the second round, the first polls, last night, show Mr. Macron to prevail, either marginally (51-49% according to IFOP-Fiducial), or purely (54-46% according to Ipsos), however, in each case, much less triumphant than in 2017, when it received over 66% of the vote.
“What is being decided on April 24 is a choice for society and culture”, “two visions” for the “future” of the country are at stake, said Ms. Lepen, pledging to “restore France’s national sovereignty” and “bring back the class”.
“Let us not get carried away, nothing has been judged”, warned Mr. Macron, “the dialogue we will have in the next 15 days will be decisive for our country and Europe”.
Gladiators face two major challenges. The first is the abstention, which approached 30%. The second is to attract the votes of the undecided, at a time when many French people are skeptical of Mr Macron’s policy, for some of them the “president of the rich”.
The French left, without exception, opposed the far-right candidate, with Mr Melanson first. “Not a single vote should go to Marin Le Pen,” he repeated three times to his supporters. Communists, socialists, ecologists made the same appeal, as did the candidate of the traditional right, Valerie Pekres (4.8%), even though according to her, “Emanuel Macron played with fire”.
Theoretically, the candidates in favor of which can be considered a reservoir for Mrs. Lepen are two, with the most important being Eric Zemour (around 7%). The far-right candidate, who for some analysts made Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter “more eligible”, called on his supporters yesterday to “vote for Marine Le Pen”. The second is the nationalist Nicolas Dipon-Enyan (around 2%), who made the same appeal to his followers.
However, the extent to which the out-of-race candidates’ appeals to their voters to block Ms. Lepen’s path will be heeded remains to be seen, given the personality of Mr Macron, who does not exactly like left-wing supporters. For the Sandrine Rousseau of the Greens, the president would do well to “look for left-wing voters and environmentalists one by one.” Political scientist Pascal Perino is bidding: Ms. Le Pen seems capable of reaching far beyond 2017, so Mr Macron “must mobilize to win the votes of Jean-Luc Melanson’s supporters,” he told ARTE television.
Marin Le Pen’s dominance would have a major international impact – it has been likened to Brexit, or Donald Trump’s dominance in the US in 2016 – given her position, her declared hostility to European integration or her intention to withdraw France. from the NATO military wing, for example. It would be a double first: it would mark the first victory of a far-right candidate in the polls and the first emergence of a woman in the presidency. Her party’s Louis Alio of the Rassemblement national (RN), her party, said enthusiastically “a new election process is beginning”.
A key moment of the next fortnight is predicted to be the traditional telematch of the two candidates on April 20th.
In 2017, Mr Macron swept the French political scene and his opponent (66.1% in the second round), but this year the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen – the first far-right candidate to run in the second round of the presidential election in France, 2002 – seemed better prepared. She focused her campaign on the purchasing power and standard of living of the French people – the main concern of the electorate, according to opinion polls – at a time when Mr Macron, largely committed to diplomacy in the midst of the war in Ukraine, did not appear to be gives the required weight in the first round. His comfortable lead, which reached 10 points in some polls just a month before the election, has shrunk dramatically.
For Adrian Thierry, a 23-year-old supporter of Emanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen turned her campaign around France and proved that “she knows how to talk to the world about her tangible problems. “In the next two weeks, he (President Macron) will need to focus more on what is happening in France, to take a break from diplomacy.”
The only thing that is certain is that yesterday’s vote confirmed the collapse of the two traditional parties in power in France, with Mrs. Pecres of the Republicans not even exceeding 5% and Ann Indalgo, the Socialist candidate of former President François Hollande even more, disappointing performance, staying below 2% (at 1.7%).
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