Among the sources of uncertainty: A Macron win would mark a rare re-election for an incumbent in a country where voters are known to be unforgiving of their leaders. He doesn’t have the same level of enthusiasm as when he first ran in 2017, he launched his own centrist political movement and became France’s youngest president.
Additionally, final polls missed the margin of results by almost nine percentage points in 2017. This time, turnout could be critical. And, since the surprise success of the Brexit referendum in 2016, few in Europe are willing to rule out the unexpected.
This election has already brought the extreme right closer to the French presidency than ever before. In the first round of voting on April 10, Macron received 28 percent of the vote and Le Pen 23 percent.
A runoff victory for Le Pen, 53, would put an anti-immigrant populist in charge of the European Union’s second-largest economy and its only nuclear power. He would replace an ardent supporter of the EU with a longtime critic of the bloc. Le Pen’s past admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and her recent calls for reconciliation between NATO and Russia have also raised concerns that a far-right victory will empower a leader who shares Putin’s worldview. , and which could become a key obstacle to Western support for Ukraine. .
Most of the candidates who did not qualify for the second round pleaded with their supporters not to vote for Le Pen. His hopes now rest largely on the potential for high abstention rates among voters leaning toward Macron.
By noon, turnout was 26 percent, down nearly 2 percentage points from the same time five years ago, but up 1 percentage point from the first round two weeks ago.
Le Pen cast her vote in the far-right stronghold of Hénin-Beaumont in northern France on Sunday morning, and Macron in Le Touquet, a seaside town where he has often stayed during election weekends. Both candidates took the opportunity to mingle with the crowds waiting for them outside the polling stations, taking selfies and shaking hands with supporters.
Throughout his first term, Macron, 44, repeatedly gambled his future on long-shot political gambles with mixed results: getting ahead tax cuts for the rich that offended many of his left-wing supporters, but he also managed to successfully introduce a vaccine pass-through in one of Europe’s most vaccine-skeptical nations.
His re-election strategy seemed to be another one of those bets. He barely campaigned before the first round, focusing instead on the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. It is not uncommon for French incumbents to avoid the campaign trail, but his decision allowed Le Pen to claim, as he toured the country, that he was more in tune with the economic concerns on the minds of French voters.
If Macron’s last-minute campaign ends in his comfortable re-election, it would boost a president who has at times been underestimated.
But depending on the margin of his victory, Macron could also face an onerous second term, marred by resistance in the streets and in parliament, that could further polarize the country and embolden fringes of French politics.
“Macron should try to listen to all these people who are in difficulty,” said Nathalie Meslin, 58, a lawyer who voted for Macron in Paris on Sunday, though she said she did not agree with all of his proposals. “Over the next 5 years this anger is likely to grow and unfortunately we risk extremes coming to power.”
Nearly 60 percent of voters cast their ballots for far-right or far-left candidates in the first round.
“There will be very little enthusiasm” if he is re-elected, said Vincent Martigny, a political scientist at the University of Nice. “The legitimacy of his mandate will depend on how wide the margin is, and also how he reacts to victory.”
“The question is, will he listen to the feeling of discomfort that exists in the French electorate?” Martini said. “Will he be able to change?”
When Macron faced Le Pen five years ago, he beat her by a margin of more than 30 percentage points. That the gap has been in the single digits at certain points in this cycle suggests that Le Pen has succeeded in normalizing his party and tempering his image.
Supporting the far right was unthinkable to many in France at the time Le Pen sided with her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was known for his xenophobia and for calling the Nazi gas chambers just a “detail”. ” from World War II.
Le Pen changed the name of the party from the National Front to the National Rally in 2018. She downplayed her family ties, with campaign posters referring to her as “Marina” or simply “M”.
But much of the party’s DNA has remained intact. In this campaign, Le Pen advocated for a referendum to end immigration to France, for women to be fined for wearing the veil in public, and for a France-first approach to policies that would bring her into direct confrontation with laws and values. of the European Union.
While terrorism was a dominant election issue five years ago, it has played less of a role this campaign, in part because the risk of attacks appears to have receded. But the issue still looms large in France: election coverage on television networks was briefly interrupted on Sunday after a man allegedly assaulted a priest with a knife in the city of Nice. Authorities later said that the suspect, who was arrested, had been undergoing psychological treatment and that they were not treating the incident as terrorism.
Rather than security issues, Le Pen’s campaign focused largely on capturing public frustration with Macron’s economic and social policies. In addition, he encouraged the sentiment that Macron, a former investment banker, has been a “president of the rich” who can be aloof and arrogant.
In Hénin-Beaumont, where Le Pen cast his vote on Sunday, Joel Vivile said on Saturday that he will vote for Le Pen “to have a change”.
“Five years of hard times under Macron, enough is enough,” said Vivile, 57, unemployed.
But Jean-Philippe Dahene, 56, said he was not convinced by Le Pen’s proposals. “I want to leave [Macron] he has one more mandate to continue what he has established,” he said, citing the series of crises that interrupted Macron’s presidency, including the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Macron hopes that for all the voters who don’t like her, more people will strongly oppose Le Pen.
“April 24 is a referendum on the future of France,” Macron told BFM television in a final interview Friday night, comparing the stakes — and the potential risks of abstentionism — with the US election in 2016 and the Brexit vote. “It is a choice between leaving or not leaving Europe… a choice between turning our backs on ecology or not, a choice between leaving or not leaving the secular republic,” he said.
Macron’s approval rating has hovered around 45 percent in recent months. His two most recent predecessors, leftist François Hollande and center-right Nicolas Sarkozy, had lower ratings toward the end of their single-term presidencies, with Hollande at around 20 percent and Sarkozy around 35 percent. Sarkozy was not re-elected, while Hollande did not seek a second term.
Birnbaum reported from Riga and Petit reported from Hénin-Beaumont, France. Lenny Bronner in New York and Scott Clement in Washington contributed to this report.
Reference-www.washingtonpost.com