Key moments
Marine Le Pen has conceded defeat to President Macron in the French election.
According to early estimates, Macron won a clear victory. The estimates had the 44-year-old centrist incumbent on course to defeat his right-wing populist challenger, aged 53, by about 16 percentage points.
The margin was narrower than in 2017 when Macron beat Le Pen by 66 per cent to 34 per cent but nevertheless wide enough for his supporters to celebrate what they saw as a vindication of his policy choices and campaign strategy.
Le Pen said her unprecedented score in a presidential election represents “a shining victory in itself”.
She said: “The ideas we represent are reaching summits.”
Macron may have won — but now faces stern test
Emmanuel Macron sought to remain above the fray before the first round of the election on April 10, only entering the arena in the final two weeks ahead of his run-off against Marine Le Pen (Adam Sage writes).
When he finally hit the campaign trail, he tried to depict himself as the pillar of mainstream France and the defender of a European Union threatened by what he called Le Pen’s dangerous “extremism”.
The tactics rallied a majority of voters around him, but infuriated the working-class provincials who form the bedrock of the National Rally candidate’s support.
Macron now faces the challenge of drawing them back towards him as he seeks to steer a fractured country through a zone of likely turbulence amid the return of inflation, simmering discontent over living standards and the war in Ukraine.
Macron was keen to mark his re-election and was preparing to deliver his victory speech at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, where thousands of supporters were gathering.
As for Le Pen, she had booked a convention centre in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris with a capacity for 500 people. The choice of venue was a sign that she was expecting defeat.
The early estimates were provided by pollsters and were based on counts at what they said were a representative sample of polling stations across the country.
What would a Macron or Le Pen win mean for Britain?
Emmanuel Macron
Boris Johnson has a difficult relationship with Emmanuel Macron (Steven Swinford, political editor, writes). The prime minister will hope that a Macron victory will help clear the way for more constructive talks about stopping migrants crossing the Channel.
Discussions have previously turned hostile, with the UK accusing France of failing to do enough to police its shores and France attacking Johnson for leaving the European Union.
The UK hopes that after the elections discussions will become less politicised.
Tensions have been exacerbated by Brexit. Macron once described Brexit as a “serious mistake” and there are continuing tensions over fishing rights and the UK’s threat to trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol. These tensions are likely to deepen if Macron wins.
There are also significant differences over approaches to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Johnson has been publicly critical of Macron’s dialogue with Putin, suggesting that peace talks are pointless. Macron, however, believes that discussions with Putin are necessary to reduce the threat of another world war.
Marine Le Pen
Marine Le Pen is heavily favoured by some Tory MPs on the right of the party. She recently welcomed Boris Johnson’s plans to send migrants to Rwanda for processing and has called for a new defence partnership with post-Brexit Britain.
While she has moved away from her original plan to leave the European Union, she has pledged a series of plans which would create a significant wedge, including a referendum on giving priority to French citizens for social housing, jobs and welfare.
The plans, alongside her pledge to tighten border controls and slash contributions to the EU budget, will lead to significant clashes on the Continent.
However, while Le Pen’s views and policies may curry favour for some Conservatives, there are concerns that they could also fracture Europe at a time when a joined-up response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is needed more than ever.
There are particular concerns in the UK about her plans to leave Nato’s military command structure and renegotiate its alliance with the United States. Some in government are alarmed about her comments about President Putin. Le Pen has previously expressed open admiration for Putin’s policies and blamed tensions in the West on the US and Nato. In February this year she claimed that Russia had no desire to invade Ukraine, despite the build-up of troops on its borders, and her manifesto described Moscow as an important future partner. She has since changed her stance, renouncing any plans for a military entente with Moscow and talking about war crimes in Ukraine. However, she has refused to describe Putin as a war criminal and remains opposed to an energy embargo against Moscow because of its impact on the cost of living in France.
Who will succeed in picking up the other candidates’ votes?
Emmanuel Macron owed much of his 27.8 per cent support in the first-round vote to centre-right voters who deserted the conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse (Adam Sage and Charles Bremner write). This bolstered his chances against Marine Le Pen, who scored 23.2 per cent.
Macron also benefited from the backing of moderate left voters who abandoned Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist candidate. But that means he has now largely drained his reservoir of potential support from voters of the two mainstream left and right blocs, which suffered their biggest rout since the Fifth Republic was created in 1958.
Since Le Pen is sure of picking up most of the votes of her hard-right challenger, Éric Zemmour, one of the biggest questions is how the 22 per cent of voters who backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 70, the charismatic leader of the radical left Unbowed France party, will behave.
Admitting an honourable defeat, Mélenchon urged his supporters to give “not one single vote” to Le Pen, whom he depicted as opposed to everything he stands for, but he did not bring himself to suggest they vote for Macron.
Both Macron and Le Pen have vied to convince these left-wing voters, many of them young and disaffected with the “the system”, that they are more on their side than the other and that they should not risk helping their opponent by abstaining.
• Read the full analysis from Adam Sage and Charles Bremner here
Macron went on the offensive in TV debate
The 2022 election has been one of the oddest since the Fifth Republic’s first, in which Charles de Gaulle won in 1965 (Charles Bremner writes). For months Emmanuel Macron cruised above the mêlée as head of state. Opinion polls suggested he faced no real challenge as he tended to the pandemic and then the Ukraine war, while Marine Le Pen and the other contenders slogged it out among themselves.
After joining the fray only three weeks before the 12-candidate first round on April 10, Macron received a wake-up call when months of dogged campaigning as compassionate defender of the people paid off for the National Rally leader and she landed only four points behind him.
Macron appeared by the end of last week to have turned the tables again on the populist after mounting a direct assault on Le Pen, attempting to strip her of the emollient new visage that she has crafted since he defeated her in the 2017 run-off. He homed in on what he depicted as the xenophobic pillars of a far-right manifesto that would breach France’s constitutional guarantees of equality and remain little changed since her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s tenure as leader of the then National Front. He also poured scorn on her past attachment to President Putin and her still-unpaid loan of €9 million from a Kremlin-linked Russian bank. The climax came with their television debate on Wednesday. Macron dominated Le Pen, tearing apart her plans for the economy as well as her promise to ban the hijab, to exclude foreigners and to disrupt the European Union. Le Pen was so determined to maintain her new calm, smiling image that she barely riposted against Macron’s onslaught.
The debate was, however, not a walk-over for Macron, because of his condescending manner. Her followers accused the president of bullying and called her performance more statesmanlike. In her last rally, though, an air of desperation had entered her discourse as she seemed to have recast the election as a referendum on Macron. She appealed to people of all persuasions who hate the president to vote for her to block another “brutal” second term for the “oligarch”.
How Le Pen has softened her image
Since losing to Emmanuel Macron in the last election in 2017, Marine Le Pen has worked hard to soften her image (Peter Conradi writes). These days, she smiles a lot and makes much of her life as a single mother. It seems at odds with her position as head of a party routinely characterised as far right.
This change of style goes hand in hand with her long-standing goal of “detoxifying” the party that she took over from her father, Jean-Marie. While her father, a former paratrooper, was notorious for dismissing Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history”, Marine Le Pen has centred her campaign on the cost-of-living crisis and France’s domination by urban elites. The party, originally known as the National Front, has been renamed the much more inclusive-sounding National Rally.
Le Pen’s attempt to rebrand herself as a mainstream politician was helped by the emergence last autumn to her right of Éric Zemmour, a radical polemicist with even harder-line views on immigration and Islam. He was eliminated after doing badly in the first round a fortnight ago, but was in the race long enough to make her seem moderate in comparison.
But don’t be fooled: Le Pen is no liberal. In recent days she has spoken of plans to ban the wearing of Muslim headscarves in all public places — a policy Macron has warned could lead to civil war. Her policy of priorité nationale, which she wants enshrined in the constitution, would reduce the rights of non-French people living in France — and put her on a collision course with the EU.
A Le Pen win would be a gift for Putin
President Putin is one world leader who would probably be pleased by a Marine Le Pen victory (Tom Parfitt writes).
Any European politician who disrupts EU unity is good news for Moscow, wherever they sit on the political spectrum.
Putin pointedly welcomed Le Pen to the Kremlin in March 2017, a month before the previous French presidential election, in which she also ran.
The two leaders gave each other a boost at that meeting, with Le Pen saying she shared with Putin “a vision of co-operation and not one of subservience”. The French candidate promised she would opt out of “foolish” EU sanctions on Russia if she won.
Le Pen’s ties to Moscow had already become apparent after her party took a €9 million loan from a Russian-based bank in 2014.
However, the National Rally candidate has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Moscow has tempered its hopes for an ally in the heart of Europe.
Russian analysts think Le Pen’s previous sympathy for Putin tainted her amid western fury over the war, and in case of victory she will be restricted in pushing any policy that truly favours the Kremlin.
If Le Pen wins and the Ukraine war eventually dies down, “the best that can be hoped for is a stabilising of relations at a low level, which would already be a plus compared to how things are now”, one Moscow expert said.
Divided France: the gulf between city elites and provincial towns
Voters in Paris and in other big cities often have a positive image of President Macron (Adam Sage writes). They tend to laud him for modernising an economy long hindered by red tape, conducting himself with aplomb on the international scene and handling the health crisis with skill.
But in small provincial French towns, the view is very different. The reforms Macron introduced in an effort to encourage work rather than welfare — such as the abolition of wealth tax, a reduction in corporate taxes and a cut in housing benefit — have left him with a reputation as the “president of the rich”.
It is a reputation that has caused him to be not just disliked but loathed across swathes of north, central and eastern France, and in parts of the west and the Mediterranean coast too.
If he generates such anger, it is not only because of his policy choices. His attitude, too, goes down badly among provincial working-class voters aghast at his tendency to waver between high-flown rhetoric and sometimes coarse language, such as when he said he wanted to “emmerder [piss off]” the non-vaccinated. Critics often depict him as disrespectful and haughty.
The anger exploded in the autumn of 2018 during the yellow-vest movement driven by provincials exasperated at the rise in the cost of living and what they perceived as the growing inequality between rich and poor under Macron’s presidency.
Macron spent much of the next three years trying to bridge the gulf between the Parisian elite and the small provincial towns that were the yellow-vest bastions.
He never quite succeeded.
Marine Le Pen profile: right-wing leader of the National Rally
Marine Le Pen, 53, was born in the chic Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine and grew up in the family mansion in nearby Saint-Cloud. She has been married twice and has three children, but now shares a flat with her best friend and six female cats, saying she does not want males of any species in her household.
She has a law degree but also a cat-breeding diploma and has done little to end rumours that she will quit politics to become a full-time breeder if she fails to become president.
Having become leader of the National Rally in 2012 on the retirement of Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father and the party’s founder, she subsequently fell out with him over her attempt to make the movement less extremist and more electable.
She achieved the best ever score for a National Rally candidate that year and improved on it five years later, but lost to Macron after performing poorly in their televised debate. This year’s election is widely viewed as her last chance.
• Read Charles Bremner’s full Le Pen profile here
Emmanuel Macron profile: centrist incumbent head of state
Emmanuel Macron, 44, was born in Amiens, northeast France, and is married to Brigitte, 68, a French teacher whom he met while a pupil at the school where she worked. She has three children from her previous marriage but none with him.
After graduating from the École Nationale d’Administration, France’s most prestigious higher education establishment, he worked as a civil servant and as an investment banker until 2012 when he became an adviser, and then the economy minister, of François Hollande, the Socialist president.
He resigned from the cabinet in 2016 to launch his own centrist political movement, La République En Marche.
Despite never having stood in an election before, he ran to become president in 2017, winning after a campaign overshadowed by sleaze allegations against François Fillon, the centre-right favourite.
Macron took office on a reformist agenda, promising to borrow ideas from left and right. In practice, he has leant to the centre-right during a five-year term marked by his unflinching commitment to the EU, but also by violent protests and the pandemic.
What would a Le Pen victory mean for France and Europe?
A victory for Le Pen would mean a significant change of direction for France, and for Europe (Peter Conradi writes). The leader of the National Rally has fought a campaign based on lowering taxes to boost living standards and, more controversially, on introducing priorité nationale: a change to the constitution that would reduce the rights of non-French people living in France. This could face legal challenges at home and embroil her in a battle with Brussels, over time making it difficult for France to remain a member of the EU (even though Le Pen has said she is opposed to Frexit). She has also vowed to ban the wearing of Muslim head scarves in public. A victory for Macron would mean a continuation of his centrist policies
• Read Peter Conradi’s full analysis on Macron’s first term from today’s Sunday Times here
How significant are the early turnout figures?
The interior ministry said that 26.4 per cent of the country’s 48.7 million registered voters had cast their ballots by midday. Five years ago, the figure at the same time was 28.23 per cent. The final turnout in 2017 was 74.6 per cent, which was considered poor by French standards. There is concern among commentators that it could be even lower this year. A low number could be bad for Macron because it might mean the left-leaning voters he has tried to woo have stayed at home rather than turned out for him.
The midday turnout was nevertheless slightly higher than for the first round of the election two weeks ago. It is unclear whether this signals a marginally higher level of interest in the second round, or simply a desire to get voting out of the way early before heading off on holiday. The second round is being held during the school holidays, causing speculation that some voters may skip the ballot box in favour of a trip to the country or to the seaside.
Throughout the campaign, Macron has consistently been ahead of Le Pen in the polls with his lead widening in recent days. On Friday an Opinionway poll predicted that Macron would win re-election with 57 per cent of the vote.
In the first round Macron came out on top out of the 12 candidates in the vote, which was held on April 10. He won 27.85 per cent, followed by Le Pen on 23.15 per cent. The National Rally leader was only narrowly ahead of Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far-left France Unbowed party, who took 21.95 per cent. The big question since then has been how Mélenchon’s 7.7 million voters will behave today: will they back Macron or Le Pen, spoil their ballot papers or abstain?
France votes
Welcome to The Times’s live coverage of the French presidential election, with Emmanuel Macron facing off against Marine Le Pen. Result projections will be released at 7pm BST, which tend to be highly accurate and should tell us who has won and by how much. The results for each region will start to come in soon after, and we should get a definitive result later this evening.
• Ayesha Hazarika in London and Peter Conradi in Paris will be on Times Radio between 7pm and 8pm. Listen here
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2022-04-24 18:30:00Z
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