French election results: Emmanuel Macron defeats Le Pen to become President

Projections showed Macron beating Le Pen by around 65% to 35 - a gap wider than pre-election surveys

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 US president.

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previously held elected office, will now become France’s youngest leader since Napoleon with a promise to transcend outdated left-right divisions.

Three projections, issued within minutes of polling stations closing at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT), showed Macron beating Le Pen by around 65 per cent 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 he must try to heal.

Le Pen’s high-spending, anti-globalisation ‘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 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 run-off, who was trounced by Jacques Chirac in 2002. 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 programme. However, at least one opinion poll published in the run-up to the second round has indicated that this could be within reach.

Balloting took place after a bitter campaign that culminated in an acrimonious debate between the two candidates on Wednesday and a statement from Macron’s camp late Friday that their emails had been hacked. 

Macron and Le Pen are vying to lead a country that is politically divided. During the first round of voting on April 23, about 45 per cent of votes were cast for candidates who rejected the current economic order as well as France’s ties to the European Union. Neither the Socialists nor the Republicans, pillars of the country’s political establishment, qualified for the final round, the first time that’s happened since Charles De Gaulle ushered in the Fifth Republic in 1958.

“This election is about the defense of the euro,” Dominique Reynie, politics professor at the Sciences Po institute in Paris, said in an interview. “And it’s about the fracture running through France like other western democracies between those who succeed thanks to globalization, and those who pay the price for it.”

A Macron victory would mean that French voters will have broken with the populist surge that saw the UK vote to leave the European Union and carried Donald Trump to the White House. A win for Le Pen would be a devastating blow to Europe’s post-war project of political unification and would likely unleash a financial-market selloff as new concerns about the euro’s viability resurface. Le Pen posted her party’s biggest-ever vote in the first ballot on a platform that included abandoning the single currency and reintroducing the franc.

Whether she wins or not, Le Pen has conquered the depressed towns of industrial decline in the north and east, building on the National Front’s traditional heartland of the south. France’s unemployment rate remains stuck at 10 per vcent, roughly double the levels in the UK and Germany, presenting a major challenge to the next president.

“To succeed in terms of jobs is of the essence if we want to respond to this anger,” former European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet told Bloomberg Television Friday.

Voter anger, however, was not what dominated the final hours before campaigning stopped. Macron’s team said it was subject to a “massive” cyber attack in the form of the publication of campaign emails in addition to false documents.

The country’s electoral control commission requested media to refrain from disseminating details of the leaked material. It also mandated the French cyber security agency to probe the attack and address any issue.

Gathering Data

Although the agency has been at work at the team’s headquarters since then, it has so far been unable to identify those behind the hacking and is currently gathering data and re-securing the team’s network, a government official said by phone. Any findings are likely to be immediately classified, the official said. The person declined to be named, citing security concerns.

News of the hacking complaint was picked up by print media including Le Monde newspaper and Agence France-Presse and debated on social media, though broadcasters remained silent on the matter Saturday.

Le Pen aide Florian Philippot suggested that the media had avoided scrutinizing Macron thoroughly.

“Will the #Macronleaks uncover things that investigative journalism has deliberately killed?” Philippot said in a tweet just before the blackout began. “Frightening democratic shipwreck.”