By Abdul Ruff
Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France on May 7 with a business-friendly vision of European integration, defeating Marine Le Pen, a far-right nationalist who threatened to take France out of the European Union (EU) to be the second European nation to be out of EU by following Brexit.
The 39-year-old former investment banker, who served for two years as economy minister but has never previously held elected office, will now become France’s youngest leader since Napoleon with a promise to transcend outdated left-right divisions. The projections, issued within minutes of polling stations closing at 8 p.m showed Macron beating Le Pen by around 65% to 35 – a gap wider than the 20 or so percentage points that pre-election surveys had pointed to.
Macron, the 48-year-old’s share of the vote was set to be almost twice that won by her father Jean-Marie, the last National Front candidate to qualify for a presidential runoff, who was trounced by Jacques Chirac in 2002.
Against mainstream politics
Emmanuel Macron is a former investment banker who has won Presidency and for the first time will hold an elected office. Running as an independent, Macron formed the “En Marche Party” after serving as economics minister under French President Francois Hollande. He has described himself as “pro European Union and pro immigrant.”
Macron describes himself as being pro European Union. In his political rallies, Macron encourages supporters to wave both the French tricolor and the European Union flags. One commentator remarked: “He is the man Europe wants”.
So much so that European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker broke protocol of staying neutral and publicly congratulated Macron for winning the first round against Marine Le Pen. A commission spokesman later clarified that according to the EU, the decision facing the French electorate “was a fundamental one”, between Macron, who represents pro-Europe values, and Le Pen, who “seeks its destruction”.
Macron was expected to be propelled to power an estimated 8.25 million voters switching their allegiance from also-rans Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Benoit Hamon and Francois Fillon. The centrist candidate won 23.9 per cent of the first round of voting and looks set to win 60 per cent of the final round on May 7. Marine Le Pen came second in the initial vote with 21.4 per cent, and is predicted to score 40 per cent in the second round.
When the race to win the French presidential election has entered its final days and first round with Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen both vying to win over it wasn’t quite clear whom the electorate as voters wanted to choose. The two candidates face off in the second round on May 7, where Macron is widely tipped to become the president of France – he would take 65 per cent of the vote in a second-round run-off against Le Pen.
People have lost trust in the existing mainstream parties. It was expected that Macron – a centrist – should be able to attract a wider spectrum of second-round voters than Le Pen, pulling in left-leaning voters from Hamon and Mélenchon as well as those leaning to the right that voted Fillon in the first round.
Marine Le Pen
Ms Le Pen is the outsider with odds of 13/2, however most bets have been placed on the far-right candidate. Le Pen’s high-spending, anti-globalization ‘France-first’ policies may have unnerved financial markets but they appealed to many poorer members of society against a background of high unemployment, social tensions and security concerns.
The market for the Next President naturally exploded into life on polling day and with the race narrowed down to the last two there is still plenty of bets coming in. Macron had a very clear lead over Le Pen once votes were counted and he was trading as the strong odds-on favourite with an 88% chance of winning. Despite this fact, Le Pen accounted for 70% of bets placed since the first round but remains trading at 13/2, so the bets being placed on her are likely to be small punts from bettors expecting the type of last minute upset world has become accustomed to in recent politics.
Marine Le Pen performed much better this time as she achieved her highest vote shares in the North East of France when she failed to make the second round in 2012. It was no different this time around with there being a clear East-West divide in the way that the country voted. Le Pen attracted her highest vote share in the department of Aisne, to the North East of Paris. More than one in three votes went to the Front National leader in Aisne – double the number that went to Macron.
However, support for Le Pen within Paris was conspicuous by its absence. Fewer than one in 20 voters cast their ballots for the far-right leader. This is a lower proportion than who did so in 2012. Three days on from a terror attack in the capital that claimed the life of a police officer, it makes Paris one of just four areas of the country where Front National support fell compared to 2012. Macron scooped up 34.8 per cent of the vote in Paris, his strongest area of support.
Aside from in Paris, though, Macron’s vote share tended to be higher in the North western areas of France; areas like Ille et Vilaine and Finistere in Brittany.
Ms Le Pen has announced that she is temporarily stepping aside as the National Front leader in a last-ditch attempt to win voters on a non-partisan platform. “This evening, I am no longer the president of the National Front. I am the candidate for the French presidency,” she said.
Candidates support Macron
Immediately after the first round of voting, Fillon and Hamon urged supporters to back Macron in order to prevent a Le Pen presidency. Fillon, once the favourite to win the election, said in his concession speech: “The National Front has a history of violence and it would bankrupt France, especially by plunging us into EU chaos and taking us out of the Euro,” he said. “Extremism can only give rise to division within France and so I urge you to vote against extremism.”I will vote for Emmanuel Macron, it’s my duty.”
A massive 72 per cent (1.65m) of his supporters now said they will back Macron, with just two per cent (45,000) switching to Ms Le Pen and 26 per cent (595,000) abstaining. Jean-Luc Mélenchon stopped short of endorsing Macron, but has launched a poll of his supporters.
Forty-three per cent of Fillon voters (3.1m) switched plan to vote for Macron, with 31 per cent (2.23m) supporting Ms Le Pen and 26 per cent (1.87m) abstaining. Hamon echoed his words, calling the National Front “an enemy of France”.
Macron the consensual candidate
The second round is important as the top two candidates fight the final results. The top two candidates Macron and Marine faced off in a second run-off on May 7. Of the nine elections since the first direct presidential election in the Fifth Republic in 1965, three have seen the winner of the first round lose out in the second. This led to the elections of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1974, François Mitterrand in 1981 and Jacques Chirac in 1995.
The consultation was sent to 450,000 registered supporters, and says: None of us will vote for the far-right. Half of Mélenchon voters polled by PrésiTrack plan to vote for Macron, which translates to 3.5 million extra votes. Another 18 per cent (1.27m) are set to back Ms Le Pen and 32 per cent (2.2m) plan to abstain.
When asked who they thought will be elected as president, 80 per cent said Macron with just 16 per cent backing Ms Le Pen. When asked who they would like to see elected, 59 per cent said Macron and 33 per cent said Ms Le Pen.
Macron has vowed that he would be “a president of all the people of France”. In recent days his campaign has been overshadowed by fresh attention of his marriage to Brigitte Trogneaux – his former high-school teacher who is 24 years his senior.
Macron has been the bookies’ favourite to become president, with the last average of the polls before the election showing him considerably ahead of Le Pen. For those who have lost faith in political polling, asking people who are prepared to put their money where their mouth is the best way to predict elections.
Observation
Apparently, the election was meant as a national referendum on whether France should follow the UK path by opting for Francexit or remain inside the EU and the results reveals that people want the French nation to stay in EU.
Pro EU Emmanuel Macron ‘s emphatic victory, which also smashed the dominance of France’s mainstream parties, will bring huge relief to European allies who had feared another populist upheaval to follow Britain’s vote to quit the EU and Donald Trump’s election as US president.
Macron will be sworn into office as the French president. It was a record performance for the National Front, a party whose anti-immigrant policies until recently made it a pariah in French politics, and underlined the scale of the divisions that Emmanuel Macron must try to heal.
Macron’s immediate challenge will be to secure a majority in next month’s parliamentary election for En Marche! (Onwards!), his political movement that is barely a year old, in order to implement his program. However, at least one opinion poll published in the run-up to the second round has indicated that this could be within reach.
After Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the 2015 General Election, many now believe that political betting markets can better predict elections, relying on the wisdom of a crowd of punters to sort and weigh all the probabilities.
Macron is determined to implements “reforms” into the European Union, which would include having a common budget, finance minister, working together on defence and perhaps the biggest project: strengthening the Euro. “The euro is a weak deutsche mark,” Macron has said. “The status quo is synonymous, in 10 years’ time, with the dismantling of the euro.” “The truth is that we must collectively recognize that the euro is incomplete and cannot last without major reforms. It has not provided Europe with full international sovereignty against the dollar on its rules. It has not provided Europe with a natural convergence between the different member states,” he added.
Macron has also said he was “wary of globalization” as “not everyone respects the rules so we will turn the protection of European industry into one of the major pillars of reinventing the EU.” He is also determined to make Paris a rival to London when it comes to banking and finance, which will inevitably cause friction with the UK.
Some believe that a Macron win would end the populist wave that seemed to be making its way around the world after Brexit and the Trump win. That might be premature. However, Macron wants closer ties with the West and is seemingly wary of Vladimir Putin, which would be music to the ears of prominent leaders.
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