PARIS (Reuters) – Centrist Emmanuel Macron, running on the “En
Marche!” platform, and far-right National Front leader Marine Le
Pen are set to face each other in a May 7 runoff for the French
presidency after coming first and second in Sunday’s first round
of voting, according to multiple projections. The result makes Macron most likely to become the next
president of France. Though Macron, 39, is a comparative political novice who has
never held elected office, opinion polls in the run-up to the
ballot have consistently seen him easily winning the final clash
against the 48-year-old Le Pen. Sunday’s outcome spells disaster for the two mainstream groupings
that have dominated French politics for 60 years, and also
reduces the prospect of an anti-establishment shock on the scale
of Britain’s vote last June to quit the EU and the election of
Donald Trump as U.S. president. The euro currency was quoted higher immediately after the first
projections were issued, with banks quoting the US dollar at
around $1.092 versus $1.072 on Friday evening, according to
Reuters data. In a race that was too close to call up to the last minute,
Macron, a pro-European Union ex-banker and economy minister who
founded his own party only a year ago, was projected to get 24
percent of the first-round vote by the pollster Harris, and 23.7
percent by Elabe.
Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigration and anti-EU National
Front, was given 22 percent by both institutes. At least three
further pollsters all projected broadly similar results. Macron’s supporters, gathered at a Paris conference center burst
into singing the national anthem, the Marseillaise, a few seconds
after results came through. Many were under 25, reflecting some
of the appeal of a man aiming to become France’s youngest head of
state since Napoleon. Le Pen, who is herself bidding to make history as France’s first
female president, follows in the footsteps of her father, who
founded the National Front and reached the second round of the
presidential election in 2002. Jean-Marie Le Pen was ultimately crushed when voters from right
and left rallied around the conservative Jacques Chirac in order
to keep out a party whose far-right, anti-immigrant views they
considered unpalatably xenophobic. His daughter has done much to soften her party’s image, and found
widespread support among young voters by pitching herself as an
anti-establishment defender of French workers and French
interests.
Marine
Le Pen (L), French National Front (FN) political party leader and
candidate for French 2017 presidential election, leaves a polling
booth as she votes in the first round of 2017 French presidential
election at a polling station in Henin-Beaumont, northern France,
April 23, 2017.
REUTERS/Charles
Platiau
“Rampant globalization”
“The great issue in this election is the rampant globalization
that is putting our civilization at risk,” she declared in her
first word after results came through.
Nevertheless, Le Pen seems destined to suffer a similar fate to
her father.
Defeated Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon, Socialist Prime
Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and defeated right-wing candidate
Francois Fillon all urged voters to rally behind Macron in the
second round.
Harris gave both Fillon, badly damaged by allegations that his
wife had been paid from the public purse for work she did not do,
and far-left contender Jean-Luc Melenchon 20 percent in the first
round.
“This defeat is mine and it is for me and me alone to bear it,”
Fillon told a news conference, adding that he would now vote for
Macron.
The result will mean a face-off between politicians with
radically contrasting economic visions for a country whose
economy lags that of its neighbors and where a quarter of young
people are unemployed.
Macron favors gradual deregulation measures that will be welcomed
by global financial markets, as well as cuts in state expenditure
and the civil service. Le Pen wants to print money to finance
expanded welfare payments and tax cuts, ditch the euro currency
and possibly pull out of the EU.
Whatever the outcome on May 7, it will mean a redrawing of
France’s political landscape, which has been dominated for 60
years by mainstream groupings from the center-left and
center-right, both of whose candidates faded.
Macron ally Gerard Collomb said the defeat of the mainstream
center-left Socialists and the center-right Republicans showed a
“deep malaise” in French society.
The final outcome on May 7 will influence France’s standing in
Europe and the world as a nuclear-armed, veto-wielding member of
the U.N. Security Council and founding member of the organization
that transformed itself into the European Union.
(Additional reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta, Bate Felix, Michaela
Cabrera, Michel Rose, Geert De Clercq, Mathieu Rosemain, John
Irish, Andrew Callus, Sarah White in Paris, and Ilze Filks in
Henin-Beaumont; Writing by Kevin Liffey; Editing by Richard
Balmforth)
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