Election results, almost

The results of the first round of the French presidential election are anything but comforting. They show an incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, who performed better than initially expected, but nowhere near as well as he should have. Most of all, they show a far right at the gates of power, with a real chance of winning the final round in two weeks.

Until now, Macron has essentially declined to campaign, styling himself as a wartime president negotiating the bloody conflict between Russia and Ukraine. But French voters are skeptical, and the next two weeks may not be enough time for Macron to fend off far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.

Here are the key story lines of Sunday’s results:

1. The election is now Macron’s to lose. The French president, whose lead in the polls rapidly diminished in the lead-up to the first round of the vote, fared slightly better than anticipated. He came in at about 28 percent, roughly five points ahead of Le Pen’s 23 percent.

Though the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon nearly topped Le Pen, the final vote—as it was in 2017— will be a face-off between embattled Macron and Le Pen, who is more popular than ever despite her explicit ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The key question is whether, over the next two weeks, the nominally centrist Macron, whose presidency has seen a slew of right-wing economic reforms, can convince a fragmented political left to side with him against Le Pen. What little time remains in the campaign may not suffice for Macron to convince left-wing voters he has heard their concerns.

2. The traditional parties have vanished, and extremes are on the rise.

The French political landscape has been radically transformed. More than 50 percent of voters on Sunday backed extremist parties of the far right or far left. The two venerable political parties that ran the country between the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958 and the election of Macron in 2017—Les Républicains, the center-right party that derives from the template of Charles de Gaulle, and the Socialists, who advanced much of the French welfare state’s programs—have both faded from view.

3. The far right has never been stronger.

In her third run for the Élysée Palace, Le Pen fared better than she ever has and will likely out-perform her 2017 final score in two weeks. She was not the only far-right contender on the ballot: Éric Zemmour, the former LeFigaro columnist, dominated headlines for months and shaped the debate since the beginning with his innumerable provocations such as the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and incendiary comments on Vichy France and the Holocaust (Zemmour is Jewish, but has deliberately whitewashed that dark chapter of French history).

The result is that, outside of Macron’s unwieldy and chaotic centrist camp, various shades of the far right received much more attention than they have in the past or than they otherwise would have if Macron’s party had not siphoned off so many from the two traditional parties.

What is especially shocking is the way that many voters now see in what was once a fringe faction the genesis of a credible alternative.

4. The French left is not dead; it’s just fragmented.

One particularly important story so far was the success of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left firebrand who scored remarkably well at 22 percent and nearly edged Le Pen out of the final round. He lost to Le Pen by only 422,000 votes.

Although the Socialists have lost their oncetowering stature, there is still considerable energy on the left, and it only seems to be seeking a leader. For now, that leader seems to be Mélenchon.