Pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron won a second term as French president, becoming the first leader to win re-election in France in 20 years after a campaign in which he defeated far-right Marine Le Pen by a decisive 58.2% to 41.8%, according to initial estimates. results.
Macron, who has to address his supporters in a rally to win at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, defeated Le Pen by a margin of 66%, winning against her in 2017. Turnout was also lower than five years ago. years, and abstentions were estimated at 28%.
Le Pen managed to give the far right the biggest result in the French presidential election after campaigning for the cost of living crisis and promising a ban on Muslim headscarves in public places, as well as nationalist measures to give priority to locals. The French above others for work, housing, benefits and health care. She called it “a brilliant victory in itself”, adding: “The ideas we present are reaching their heights.”
During a frantic last two-week campaign, Macron traveled to town squares across France to shake off what he thought was the unfairly stubborn label of a creature who is an outcast “president of the rich.” He vowed to dedicate the next five years to rebuilding France to full employment, saying his policies, such as loosening French labor laws, had already created jobs and he would finally end decades of mass unemployment in the country.
But while Macron promised his own quick new package of laws to tackle the cost of living crisis and eased his time frame for raising the retirement age, he ended up focusing much less on his own manifesto in recent days and more on stopping what he called “unthinkable”: the far-right, anti-immigration Le Pen, which is taking the helm in France, the eurozone’s second-largest economy and a nuclear power.
Macron described the last days of his re-election campaign as a “battle for Europe” against Eurosceptic Le Pen. He will use his victory to step up efforts to strengthen the EU’s defense project, work more closely on immigration and more regulation to counter the weight of giant technology platforms like Google. France will hold the rotating presidency of the European Council until the end of June.
Macron described the choice between himself and Le Pen as a “referendum on Europe, ecology and secularism” and said the far-right leader’s demands to change the EU treaty would push France out of the bloc. He called her a “climate skeptic” and said her plan to ban Muslim headscarves in all public places, including the streets, would violate the French constitution and religious freedoms and spark a “civil war”.
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Macron accused Le Pen of being financially “dependent” on Vladimir Putin’s Russia after she took out a Russian loan for her party in 2014, and said her ties to the Kremlin meant she would be a dangerous choice during the war in Ukraine. . Le Pen, for his part, said “fear is the only argument he has left.”
But Macron knew that after Le Pen’s campaign to stop, his support in the ballot box would reflect as much a rejection of the far right as support for his own program.
“If the French trusted me on April 24, I know very well … that there will be some of the people who voted for me who would do this to block the National Front,” he told Quotidien, deliberately using the previous one. name for Le Pen’s party, now renamed the National Rally. “So it won’t mean that they gave me a blank check and that they support and find every point of my program brilliant.”
A significant number of 7.7 million voters in the first round for the radical left, Jean-Luc Melenchon, who narrowly missed the final, said they felt torn by abstaining or voting to prevent Le Pen.
Macron has leaned to the left in recent days to try to woo Melenchon’s voters, promising to speed up measures against climate destruction and expand environmental policy. His first task is to appoint a new prime minister, whom he has promised will be dedicated to tackling the climate crisis.
The focus will now shift to the June parliamentary elections, where Macron will seek a majority for his centrist group, possibly expanding alliances with the right. He had promised a “great new political movement” and could lead to the rebranding of his party, La République En Marche. Both Le Pen and Melenchon are seeking to increase the number of MPs in their parties.
For his first step, Macron has promised to introduce a package of measures to ease the pressure of the pre-summer cost of living, including continuing ceilings on gas and energy prices.
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