President for all of France: Macron’s vow as it’s revealed 92% of UK expats backed him
EMMANUEL MACRON vowed to be a president for all of France as voting data released today showed a huge majority of French expats in the UK rejected farRight candidate Marine Le Pen.
Mr Macron secured more than 58 per cent of the vote in yesterday’s run off, helping him become the first sitting president to be re-elected in 20 years.
But with more than 40 per cent backing Ms Le Pen, he conceded in his victory speech that France was “full of anger and division”.
Speaking at a rally on the Champ de Mars underneath the Eiffel Tower last night, he pledged: “Nobody will be left by the wayside.”
This morning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky became the latest world leader to send his congratulations to Mr Macron, saying: “I wish Emmanuel Macron new successes for the benefit of the French people. I appreciate the support of France and I am convinced: we are stepping together to new common victories! To a strong and united Europe!”
According to voting information released by France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, 41,601 French expats in Britain backed Mr Macron out of 45,706 people who voted — around 92 per cent of the total.
Just 3,151 expats voted for Ms Le Pen, around seven per cent of the vote.
The data revealed over 111,000 French citizens based in the UK were eligible to vote in the election, meaning around 40 per cent of expats voted.
But while the UK-based vote showed overwhelming support for Mr Macron among the thousands of expatriates who mostly live in London, the number backing him fell slightly from 95 per cent in the last contest with Ms Le Pen in 2017.
MrMacron acknowledged that he may have won because people wanted to block Ms Le Pen from winning.
“I know a lot of people voted for me, not because of my ideals, but to block the far-Right,” Mr Macron said. “I have been entrusted with their sense of duty for the next five years.”
Appealing for unity he added: “I understand the anger that prompted people to vote far-Right, that will be my responsibility. Our own project is a humanist one, for the whole Republic.”
Despite tense relations between Britain and France in recent months over Brexit and immigration, one senior Conservative said today there would be relief across Whitehall at Mr Macron’s victory. Tory peer Lord Hayward told Talk Radio: “No question that in Whitehall there will be a sense of relief today. It gives the opportunity for consistency which is probably convenient for the British Government.”
However, this morning, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, an industry minister in Mr Macron’s government, hinted at past tensions with the UK over Brexit and the level playing field for trade.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme: “We need to find the right balance between openness of our economy because this is very much needed if we want to support growth but at the same time we need to anticipate the impact of open competition on the people within our countries... I think this is exactly what we are doing when we discuss around level playing fields with countries which are not inside the European Union”.
BY any measure, President Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the second round of voting in the French presidential election was a resounding one. In securing 58 per cent of the vote, he became the first president in two decades to be reelected. Yet many will inevitably turn to the 42 per cent won by the far-Right candidate, Marine Le Pen. She may have softened her language and benefited from France’s own rising cost of living, but she remains a figure of the hard-Right, who maintained close ties with Vladimir Putin for years.
Macron’s win, therefore, is a boost to Nato and the EU — in 2017, Le Pen supported France leaving the euro — as well as to London’s large French community, 93 per cent of whom voted for Macron. There are multifold challenges for the president as he begins a second term. His margin of victory is narrower than in 2017 — signs of the disillusionment in the centre held by Left and Right — and he must now gear up for parliamentary elections that will prove crucial for his ability to govern.
But yesterday, he received an endorsement not only for who he is not but for what he has accomplished. And in doing so, he has swept aside the traditional parties of the centre-Left and Right while vanquishing the extremes on both sides. Macron’s rise and stay remain a remarkable political achievement.