Emmanuel Macron was elected president of
France on Sunday 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, early projections
showed.
The centrist’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
U.S. president.
Five projections, issued within minutes
of polling stations closing at 8 p.m. (2 p.m. ET), showed Macron beating
Le Pen by around 65 percent to 35 – a gap wider than the 20 or so
percentage points that pre-election surveys had pointed to.
Even so, 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 Macron must now try to heal.
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.
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.
The 39-year-old former investment
banker, who served for two years as economy minister but has never
previously held elected office, will become France’s youngest leader
since Napoleon with a promise to transcend outdated left-right
divisions.
At least one opinion poll published in
the run-up to the second round has indicated that the majority he needs
could be within reach.
Despite having served briefly as economy
minister in President Francois Hollande’s deeply unpopular Socialist
government, Macron managed to portray himself as the man to recast a
political landscape moulded by the left-right divisions of the last
century.
While Macron sees France’s way forward
in boosting the competitiveness of an open economy, Le Pen wanted to
shield French workers by closing borders, quitting the EU’s common
currency the euro, radically loosening the bloc and scrapping trade
deals.
Socialist Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuze said France had chosen to retain its place at the heart of Europe.
Shortly after the first projections were
published, Le Pen, 48, said she had congratulated Macron. But she
defiantly claimed the mantle of France’s main opposition in calling on
“all patriots to join us” in constituting a “new political force”.
Her deputy said this new force would not be called “National Front”.
When he moves into the Elysee Palace
after his inauguration next weekend, Macron will become the eighth – and
youngest – president of France’s Fifth Republic.
He plans to blend a big reduction in public spending and a relaxation of labor laws with greater investment in training.
A European integrationist and pro-NATO,
he is orthodox in foreign and defense policy and shows no sign of
wishing to change France’s traditional alliances or re-shape its
military and peace-keeping roles in the Middle East and Africa.
His election also represents a
long-awaited generational change in French politics that have been
dominated by the same faces for years.
He will be the youngest leader in the
current Group of Seven (G7) major nations and has elicited comparisons
with youthful leaders past and present, from Canadian Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau to British ex-premier Tony Blair and even President John
F. Kennedy in the United States.
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