French elections: Macron and Le Pen to fight for presidency
Emmanuel Macron has won the first round of the French election and far-right rival Marine Le Pen will fight him for the presidency for a second time.
“Make no mistake, nothing is decided,” he told cheering supporters.
In the end, he won a convincing first-round victory, but opinion polls suggest the run-off could be much closer.
Ms Le Pen called on every non-Macron voter to join her and “put France back in order”.
With 97% of the results counted, Emmanuel Macron had 27.6% of the vote, Marine Le Pen 23.41%, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon 21.95%.
Twelve candidates were in the running, but these were the only three who polled more than 10%. Many voters appeared to embrace the idea of tactical or “useful” voting, deciding that the other nine candidates had no hope of making the run-off.
Several of the nine had little chance anyway, but the 2022 presidential election will be partly remembered for the disaster that befell the two old parties that used to run France, the Republicans, and Socialists. They sank almost without trace, with Socialist Anne Hidalgo falling below 2%.
It was only a few months ago that Valérie Pécresse was still in the race for the right-wing Republicans. She performed so badly, that her party could not even scrape the 5% needed to claim its election costs.
This is potentially terrible news for a party already tearing itself apart. Parties that fail to reach 5% only get €800,000 (£670,000) of their campaign funding covered by the state, and the Republicans will have paid out far more than that.
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