Centrist easily tops far-right populist
FRANCE
PARIS — Emmanuel Macron, a youthful former investment banker, handily won France’s presidential election on Sunday, defeating the staunch nationalist Marine Le Pen after voters firmly rejected her far-right message and backed his call for centrist change.
Macron, 39, who has never held elected office, will become the youngest president in the 59-year history of France’s Fifth Republic after
leading an improbable campaign that swept aside France’s establishment political parties.
The election was watched around the world for magnifying many of the broader tensions rippling through Western democracies, including the United States: populist anger at the political mainstream, economic insecurity among middle-class voters and rising resentment toward immigrants.
Macron’s victory offered significant relief to the European Union, which Le Pen had threatened to leave. His platform to loosen labor rules, make France more competitive globally and deepen ties with the EU is also likely to reassure a global financial market that was jittery at the prospect of a Le Pen victory.
Her loss provided further signs that the populist wave that swept Britain out of the EU and Donald Trump into the White House may have crested in Europe, for now.
“I understand the divisions of our country that have led some to vote for extremists,” Macron said, standing before the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre, once the main residence of France’s kings, as thousands of flag-waving supporters gathered on the plaza to celebrate. “I understand the anger, the anxiety, the doubts that a great part among us have also expressed.”
Macron pledged to do all he could in his five-year term to bring France together. “I will do everything I can in the coming five years to make sure you never have a reason to vote for extremism again,” he said.
But the election results showed that many people chose not to vote for either candidate, signaling skepticism about his project.
But Macron quickly made clear that he understood the magnitude of the task before him after an often angry campaign. “It is my responsibility to hear and protect the most fragile,” he said.
With nearly 100 percent of the vote counted, Macron had 66 percent, compared with 34 percent for Le Pen, according to the official count from the Interior Ministry.
The outcome was a watershed for Le Pen’s party, the far-right National Front, giving it new legitimacy even though the results showed that the party remains anathema to much of the French electorate for its history of anti-Semitism, racism and Nazi nostalgia.
As significant for France and for Macron’s future, nearly 34 percent of eligible voters did not cast a ballot or cast a blank or null one, suggesting that a large number of people could not bring themselves to vote for him. The abstention rate was the highest since 1969.
That lack of support presaged a difficult road ahead as Macron tries to build a legislative majority to push through his program. French parliamentary elections are weeks away, in June. Currently, he has no party in Parliament.
“We saw the emergence of very strong anti-capitalist forces,” said Gaspard Koenig, the director of the French think tank Generation Libre. Those forces also spoke to the odds stacked against Macron, a former economy minister in the departing Socialist government.
“You have 50 percent of the electorate that reject the market economy in a very radical way,” Koenig added. “Thus, he must during the next five years convince people that there are alternatives to the destruction of capitalism that can help them.”
The runoff election was groundbreaking for being a choice between two political outsiders, as well as for its rancor and for an apparent attempt to sway the vote with the hacking of Macron campaign emails, similar to the attack directed at last year’s election in the United States.
Le Pen, 48, conceded the election not long after polls closed in France, saying voters had chosen “continuity,” denying Macron his outsider status and linking him to the departing Socialists.
The vote was a record for the National Front and, she said, a mandate for it to become a new “patriotic and republican alliance” that would be “the primary opposition force against the new president.”
Le Pen earned 10.6 million votes, close to twice the number her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, received when he ran a losing presidential campaign against Jacques Chirac in 2002. The 34 percent of the vote Le Pen won was the highest share the French had ever given to her party.
Macron formed his political movement, En Marche! (Onward!), a little more than a year ago. He was initially given a slim chance of winning in a country that has never elected a president from outside the traditional leftwing or right-wing parties, with the exception of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a centrist who led from 1974 to 1981.