French President Emmanuel Macron defeated his far-right rival Marine Le Pen on Sunday by a comfortable margin, early projections by pollsters showed, securing a second term and heading off what would have been a political earthquake. (Read More Here).
Macron will join a small club – only two French presidents before him have managed to secure a second term. But his margin of victory looks to be tighter than when he first beat Le Pen in 2017, underlining how many French remain unimpressed with him and his domestic record.
That disillusion was reflected in turnout figures, with France’s main polling institutes saying the abstention rate would likely settle around 28%, the highest since 1969.
For all that, Macron, 44, pulled off an impressive feat: He is the first French leader in 20 years to win reelection—since 2002, when then-president Jacques Chirac won against Le Pen’s rabidly anti-immigrant father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who faced a wall of opposition that blocked his path to power.
Macron managed that despite barely campaigning for months, preferring instead to play the global statesman in the buildup to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Then over just a few weeks, Macron sprinted across France, warning voters that a Le Pen presidency would ravage their cherished humanist principles, and render the 27-country E.U. untenable. “April 24 will be a referendum for or against Europe, and we are for!” he told thousands of people in the closing hours of the campaign on Friday, standing in a marketplace in the southern village of Figeac, amid a sea of blue, E.U. flags in the crowd.
Yet even so, his shrunken margin of 16.4% of victory signals the fraught political divide he now faces, as he settles back into the Elysée–problems that could play out in the country’s parliamentary elections, which take place in just seven weeks’ time
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