Bloomberg News
PARIS —— Far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron won the first round of the French presidential election Sunday, triggering a runoff on May 7 between two radically different visions of the country’s future.
National Front leader Le Pen was on course to take 24.3 percent in Sunday’s election, with Macron, a first-time candidate and political independent, winning 22.2 percent, according to projections from the Interior Ministry based on more than a third of votes counted.
For the first time in modern French political history, both establishment parties were eliminated in the first round. Republican Francois Fillon conceded within 40 minutes of polls closing after placing third with a projected 19.6 percent, while Socialist Benoit Hamon trailed in fifth place with 5.8 percent. Communist-backed Jean-Luc Melenchon was at18.1 percent and refused to concede.
Although the top two finishers were predicted by opinion polls, the result still is an upheaval that will reshape French and possibly European politics for years to come. The rejection of the two main parties reflects the anger coursing through a society traumatized by Islamic terrorism and buffeted by years of sub-par economic growth and high unemployment. A victory by Le Pen would bring that discontent to a head.
Whoever wins the presidency will have difficulty implementing their agenda. France will hold parliamentary elections in June and neither Macron’s En Marche movement nor the National Front is expected to come close to a majority in the legislature still dominated by the traditional parties.
Macron immediately picked up endorsements, with Fillon joining his Socialist rival Hamon and Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in backing him against Le Pen in runoff. Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel wished Macron all the best for the second round, while German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel praised him as “the only real pro-European candidate.”
“Today we are clearly turning a page in French political life,” Macron told Agence France-Presse after the preliminary results came in. Le Pen said French voters face a “historic opportunity” to choose between “savage globalization that threatens our civilization” or a France “with borders that protect our jobs and our purchasing power.”
Le Pen, who wants to take France out of the eurozone and clamp down on immigration, has trailed Macron, a committed globalist, in almost every opinion poll for the runoff by a margin of about 20 percentage points.
The candidates, with personalities as different as their politics, now have two weeks to show they are ready for the presidency of a country that is one of the European Union’s six founding members, a nuclear power and a veto-wielding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council alongside the U.S., Russia, China and the U.K.
