Incumbent Emmanuel Macron apparently won the first round in the battle for the Élysée Palace more clearly than expected. According to initial projections, the French President had 28 percent of the vote on Sunday evening, ahead of his far-right rival Marine Le Pen, who got 23 percent. The radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon was eliminated in third place, although he won more than 20 percent more votes than expected.
The election for the established right and left in France, who had ruled the country for decades until 2017, turned into a historic disaster: the top candidate Valérie Pecresse of the Gaullist-conservative “Les Républicains” (LR) and the Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, the candidate of the Socialists, landed behind with less than five or not even two percent of the votes.
The French will make the final decision on April 24th
The first round of the presidential election was only a preliminary decision on the fundamental direction of France. The decision on the country’s future course will be made on April 24 when the runoff between Macron and Le Pen is due. Macron has to worry about the low turnout on Sunday: more than a quarter of all voters (26.5 percent) refused to vote.
In 2017, Macron clearly won the duel against Le Pen with a two-thirds majority. This time, polls so far predict that the president will only narrowly defeat Le Pen.
It will now be crucial for the president to mobilize voters on the left and supporters of the more bourgeois Republicans. In the evening, the Republican and Socialist top candidates called on their supporters to vote for Macron. The Green Yannick Jadot, who came to just under five percent on Sunday, asked to vote for the incumbent. Mélenchon, on the other hand, called his “Indomitables” movement only to “not give a single vote to Madame Le Pen”. At the same time, he left open whether his supporters should abstain from the runoff or vote for Macron.
Le Pen benefited from the fact that the right-wing extremist publicist Éric Zemmour had spread far more radical theses as a candidate and had polemicized against refugees and Jews, for example. The 53-year-old appeared to many as “more moderate” than in 2017. Éric Zemmour came to seven percent on Sunday. He appealed to his supporters to vote for Le Pen in the runoff. Candidates from smaller far-right splinter groups made similar statements.
In the lead: Emmanuel Macron greets his supporters after the announcement of the election results.
(Photo: Thibault Camus/dpa)
Both candidates tried that evening to solicit votes from other parties. Macron addressed supporters of the eliminated candidates, including Zemour’s: everyone should “gather” behind him. Le Pen called the casting vote a fundamental election over “society, even civilisation.”
Macron had announced before the election that he would essentially continue his previous policy. During his first term in office, the 44-year-old social liberal repeatedly advocated a deepening of the European Union and promoted the liberalization of the French economy. Despite challenges from right and left, he stuck to his announcement during the election campaign that he would raise the retirement age to 65.
Le Pen plans to end France’s military integration into NATO
Le Pen, on the other hand, is Eurosceptic, but has recently stopped repeating her earlier plan to lead France out of the monetary union by referendum. She propagates a tough course against immigrants and wants to limit a number of social benefits to French people.
Up until the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine in February, Le Pen had expressed clear sympathy for Moscow’s President Vladimir Putin. She wants to restrict the common defense policy in the EU as well as armaments projects with Germany, and she wants to end France’s military integration into NATO. Observers in Brussels and Berlin fear that Le Pen’s election will “throw Europe into a deeper crisis than Brexit.”
Le Pen had focused her campaign on the loss of purchasing power of many low-income French people. In France, too, the prices for food and petrol had risen significantly since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
Macron sees many of his compatriots more as a pupil of the Parisian elite. To strengthen purchasing power, Macron has promised every employee a bonus of up to 6,000 euros if he is re-elected. The government had previously capped electricity and gas prices. Critics accuse the incumbent president of having underestimated Le Pen’s new challenge for too long.