The pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron has vowed to unite a divided France after winning a second term as French president in a decisive victory against the far-right’s Marine Le Pen.
Macron became the first French leader to win re-election in 20 years, scoring 58.54% to Le Pen’s who won more than 13 million votes or 41.46% in a historic high for her anti-immigration party.
Addressing a victory rally at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, where his supporters waved French and European flags, Macron vowed to respond “efficiently” to the “anger and disagreement” of voters who chose the far right.
“I know that a number of French people have voted for me today, not to support my ideas but to stop the ideas of the far right,” he said and called on supporters to be “kind and respectful” to others, because the country was riven by “so much doubt, so much division.”
He added: “I’m not the candidate of one camp any more, but the president of all of us.”
Macron beat Le Pen with a lower margin than the 66% he won against her in 2017. Turnout was also lower than five years ago, with abstention estimated at a record 28%.
Le Pen succeeded in delivering the far right its biggest-ever score in a French presidential election, after campaigning on the cost of living crisis, and promising a ban on the Muslim headscarf in public places as well as nationalist measures to give priority to native-French people over others for jobs, housing, benefits and healthcare – policies Macron had criticised as “racist” and “divisive.”
Le Pen called her score “a shining victory in itself”, adding: “The ideas we represent are reaching new heights.”
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The 44-year-old Macron becomes the first incumbent to win a second term since Jacques Chirac two decades ago. With campaigning shaped by the war in Ukraine, Macron’s pledge to make France a cornerstone of a stronger, more integrated EU won out over the nativism and protectionism championed by Le Pen.
The outcome is good news for investors who had predicted that a Le Pen victory would deliver a shock to markets on the scale of the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU or the election of Donald Trump in the U.S.
Yet the margin of victory is far narrower than last time, when Macron beat Le Pen by more than 30 points. The rise in support for her nationalist program reflects a bitterly divided country.
“The result in itself represents a stunning victory,” Le Pen said, before leading her supporters in a chorus of the national anthem. “Millions of people voted for the national camp and for change.”
Macron’s challenge over the next five years will be to heal those rifts and muster support for his plans to make the country more competitive by overhauling social policies such as pensions and improving the country’s economic fundamentals.
That won’t be easy. France has one of the sharpest urban-rural cleavages in Europe and Macron’s first term was marked by complaints that he gave affluent city dwellers preferential treatment. That fury exploded during protests against his pension reform and economic inequality. A spate of terrorist attacks added to the sense of insecurity and rekindled debate on what it means to be French.
With the traditional parties of the left and right in disarray, 53-year-old Le Pen was the main beneficiary, along with far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon who narrowly missed qualifying for the runoff vote. On Friday, the last day of campaigning, Macron pledged to do more to address the grievances of poorer voters to reverse the steady increase in support for Le Pen.
“She feeds on the things we haven’t managed to do,” Macron said, “things that I haven’t succeeded in doing myself, namely quelling a certain anger, responding to demands quickly enough, and in particular, succeeding in giving the prospect of progress and security to the French middle and working classes.”
France’s European allies will also be relieved by the result.
While Le Pen said she no longer wants to abandon the euro or pull France out of the EU, she argued for transforming it into a looser alliance of nations, with French and not European law supreme. That would fundamentally undermine the way the bloc works.
She also advocates withdrawing from NATO’s command structure and creating a pact with the Kremlin once the guns in Ukraine fall silent.
