Emmanuel Macron has been re-elected President of France. According to initial estimates by French election research institutes, the incumbent received 58.2 percent of the vote. His challenger, the far-right Marine Le Pen, received 41.8 percent of the vote. The election was seen as a choice of direction for France and Europe. With a clearly nationalist course, Le Pen had offensively created an atmosphere against the European Union (EU) and signaled that he wanted to distance himself from Germany. According to observers, their election program would have resulted in France leaving the EU.
Macron, on the other hand, stands for an open, free and pro-European France. He rallied the supporters of the socialists and the conservatives behind him and promised to continue an economically liberal reform course.
Many of the parties that lost in the first ballot had urged their supporters to vote for Macron in order to erect a “dam” against the extreme right. Only the leaders of France’s other two far-right parties, Éric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who together received 9 percent of the votes cast in the first ballot, called for voting for Marine Le Pen.
The pension reform is considered to be Macron’s most important new domestic policy project. Macron wants to raise the retirement age to 65 and standardize dozens of pension systems in France. However, he has already indicated that he is willing to make concessions.
Right-wing and left-wing extremist parties were attacked by his reform policies. Above all, the tax and labor market reforms made it possible for Le Pen to present herself as a representative of social equality. She had managed to occupy the issue of purchasing power in the election campaign. With his campaign against Macron’s reforms, the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon managed to garner almost as many votes in the first ballot as Le Pen.
Macron owes his election victory to a large extent to Mélenchon’s voters. He depended on their votes to win against Le Pen. In the past few days, Macron has therefore focused on Mélenchon’s campaign issues, including climate protection and social justice. Macron had given up the originally planned introduction of a carbon tax in the course of combating the corona pandemic. In the election campaign, there was no more talk of it until the very end.
How Mélenchon’s voters would behave was uncertain until the very end. The leader of the La France Insoumise party had urged his sympathizers “not to give a single vote to Madame Le Pen,” but he had not explicitly called for Macron to be elected. According to an internal party poll a week before the runoff, two-thirds of his voters would rather abstain or deliberately invalidate their vote than vote for Macron.
Many voters abstained
In fact, according to election researchers, abstention in the second round was around 28 percent, even higher than in 2017, when Macron met Le Pen for the first time in the runoff. That means more than 13.5 million eligible voters abstained from voting. There were also people who went to the polling station but threw a blank ballot without a name or an empty envelope into the ballot box. This type of voting is seen as a demonstration of an interest in the country’s political life or as an exercise of citizenship, and is increasingly used to express dissatisfaction with the political offering. A smaller number of voters also put torn or annotated ballot papers in the ballot box.
Professor Céline Braconnier, who specializes in voting behavior, told radio station France Info that the population is increasingly frustrated with voting alternatives that do not feel represented. According to the researcher, the various abstention methods tend to be at the expense of Macron. In the end, however, he was still enough to win over Le Pen on Sunday.
The outcome of the parliamentary elections in June will be decisive for Macron’s future government policy. In 2017, Macron’s recently founded party, La République en Marche, won a majority in the Paris National Assembly. Observers consider this to be unlikely this time. Mélenchon has long since started campaigning. He declared the parliamentary elections to be the “third round” and recommended himself as prime minister under Macron. In this way he wants to prevent the President from making further progress with what he sees as economically liberal reforms.