NEW FRENCH REVOLUTION
Le Pen’s Far Right in poll surge Traditional parties wiped out Now voters will have say on Frexit
French voters turned their backs on the political establishment last night in round one of the presidential election.
Emmanuel Macron – an independent centrist – won first place ahead of National Front leader Marine Le Pen.
According to exit polls, both will advance to the final round on May 7.
The result will have major implications for Britain and its departure from the EU.
Miss Le Pen wants to completely renegotiate France’s relationship with Brussels while Mr Macron wants closer links.
Yesterday’s result means France’s traditional right and left parties are out of the running for the presidency for the first time in nearly 60 years. And it is another major shock after the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s victory in the United States.
Mr Macron, a politically inexperienced 39-year-old who created his own party, said: ‘We have turned a page in French political history.’ Miss Le Pen, 48, told her supporters: ‘The French must take the step for this historic opportunity.’
Mr Macron is expected to win as the other parties unite against the Far Right.
Riots erupted in Paris with police closing streets amid the sound of sirens. Crowds
IN A sweaty sports hall in a rundown former mining town in northern France, Marine Le Pen was proclaimed last night as the country’s greatest heroine since Joan of Arc.
‘Marine! Presidente!’ her supporters chanted as the election results came in.
Whichever way European leaders and the global commentariat try to paint it, this was a truly staggering defeat for the traditional political establishment.
For the first time in post-war history, a major world democracy has, at a stroke, rejected the grand old party machines of both Left and Right – neither of which now survives to the final round of voting a fortnight hence.
The party of the hopeless outgoing French president Francois Hollande – who was famously the darling of Ed Miliband – has been obliterated.
After an emphatic step to the Right, the country now faces a stark choice between the far-Right anti-EU Front National (FN) candidate Miss Le Pen, and the young, untried exbanker Emmanuel Macron, leading his own ‘none- of-the-above’ centre-Left movement. He is now the runaway favourite for the second round of voting on May 7.
The early results put Miss Le Pen on 21.7 per cent of the vote, just behind Mr Macron on 23.7 per cent.
Yet, last night in Henin-Beaumont – where she is both local MEP and councillor – Miss Le Pen told her flag-waving supporters: ‘I am the true candidate of the people.’ Dressed in her trademark blue trouser suit she appeared happier, less weary and possibly a little blonder than in recent days.
Those wanting to ‘ protect our culture, prosperity and independence’ and to be ‘ free of our arrogant elites’, she declared, had no choice but to vote for her in the next round. It was a short, sharp distillation of the message she has been pushing for months, rounded off with a big bouquet of flowers and a chorus of the Marseillaise.
The mood here was one of pride in a job well done, but not one of triumphalism. For a sense of that, one had to turn to Mr Macron’s legion of young, T-shirted volunteers crammed into a hall in Paris.
The FN has been runner- up before and, in all probability, will be again. But the true believers were going to enjoy this historic semi-final moment.
Henin-Beaumont, pulverised in the First World War – during which it formed part of the Western Front – was once run by communists. The sports hall hosting last night’s election ‘soiree’ is named after former Socialist president Francois Mitterrand. Yet, in the last mayoral elections, more than half the population voted for the Front National. Ailing ex- industrial towns like this are Le Pen heartlands, as are areas of inter-racial tension such as the southern port city of Marseilles.
Last night’s result represents the greatest advance for the FN since the 2002 election, when party founder Jean- Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, made it to the second round with 17 per cent of the vote. On that occasion Jacques Chirac, the Republican candidate and eventual winner, scored just under 20 per cent. The gap back then was not dissimilar to that suggested in last night’s exit polls.
Yet, in the final round in 2002, the nation rallied around Mr Chirac, who won by a landslide 82 per cent against Le Pen’s 18 per cent.
Since then the next generation, Miss Le Pen, has worked hard to present herself and her party as more cuddly and less abrasive. The party is drawing increasing numbers of younger voters, illustrated by the range of faces last night (almost all white, but across the age range and evenly split between the sexes).
It is making inroads across French society. The prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, for example, now has an official Front National presence on the student body – unthinkable a few years ago.
Yet the party’s xenophobic, antiimmigrant, protectionist policies – and the frequent signs of the racist and anti- Semitic thinking in its DNA – place it firmly on the extreme. It is well to the right of parties such as Ukip, which keeps it at arm’s length in the European Parliament.
Mainstream French conservatives would rather veer to the Left than in a Le Pen direction.
The loudest boos at last night’s rally greeted the announcement by
defeated centre-Right candidate Francois Fillon that he would be urging the nation to support Mr Macron in the next round.
Mr Macron is now cast as the unity candidate and the man to beat – and will certainly be the favoured candidate as far as the European Union and the financial markets are concerned.
His avowedly pro-EU, proeuro stance makes him the status quo candidate, even though he has never previ- ously been elected to so much as the committee of his local golf club. At 39, he was the youngest of the 11 candidates.
While he presents himself as the young face of moderate reform, Miss Le Pen represents angry, left-behind France, that section of the electorate which wants drastic change – including a referendum on French membership of both the euro and the EU. Two weeks hence, France will divide on those lines. And what of the big parties? What on earth has happened?
Imagine an election where both the Conservatives and Labour found themselves pushed to the margins by the British National Party and a one-man, SDP-style personality cult.
That, more than the nitty-gritty of the numbers, is what will ensure that last night goes down as a signal moment in European political history.