President Emmanuel Macron has won the elections to the far-right Marine Le Pen with 58.2% of the vote compared to 41.8% for his rival, according to the exit polls that in the Hexagon are very close to the final result of the scrutiny. With this victory, Macron, 44 years old, will continue five more years at the Elysee and enters the club sector of presidents of the Fifth Republic who have been re-elected: Charles de Gaulle, Francois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac.
At the foot of the Eiffel Tower, where Macron has summoned his supporters tonight and where in a while he will address the French, jubilation has exploded when the televisions have reported the polls. There was confidence in victory, but not absolute certainty among those gathered there, many of them young people waving French and European flags. Waiting for the president to arrive, they dance to the rhythm set by a well-known DJ. “Allez, allez” (“Come on, Come on”), they sing as well.
Macron’s result saves France a break with republican values and tradition that it would have been total to have won Le Pen, leader of the National Regrouping (RN), the party he inherited from his father, Jean Marie Le Pen, and formerly called the National Front. It spares Europe the worst of nightmares: it makes it look like one of its founding and fundamental countries to the populist far right in power, with the undisguised intention of weakening that union that was born from Paris and that Macron intends to strengthen in his next five-year term.
Far from 66%
Related news
But what the re-elected president has not been able to avoid is that the extreme right has achieved the best result in history and has captivated almost half of the French. The result obtained by the leader of La Republique En Marche (LREM) is far from the 66% of five years ago. The leader who then said he had understood “anger, anxiety and doubts & rdquor; of the French and promised to fight against the “divisions that undermine France” and feed the extreme right, has ended up widening that gap.
It has also done so with a record abstention – at 5:00 p.m. it exceeded 37% – a symbol of the discontent of a large part of French society and the disconnect with politics. It is also the symptom of the weakening of the called Republican Front -a term that was coined 20 years ago to refer to the cordon sanitaire of all parties to cut off the path to the extreme right- faced with an option, which in continuous progression since the 1980s, reveals itself with serious options to govern one day.