French President Emmanuel Macron wins re-election, surviving a far-right challenge from Marine Le Pen
in the presidential elections—a contest that risked shattering the Western alliance against Russia, and jeopardizing the very survival of the European Union.released at 8 p.m. local time after polls closed, was significantly smaller than the two politicians’ last face-off in 2017. Back then, 39-year-old Macron shot to power as an outsider, with a 32-point lead over Le Pen, by promising to modernize what he called a sclerotic, over-regulated country.
Macron managed that despite barely campaigning for months, preferring instead to play the global statesman in the buildup to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Then over just a few weeks, Macron sprinted across France, warning voters that a Le Pen presidency would ravage their cherished humanist principles, and render the 27-country E.U. untenable.
No longer the wunderkind, Macron will need to reckon with roiling anger over his business-friendly policies, including his determination to raise the public-pension age. And there is also the deep personal dislike of Macron among many French, who describe him in numerous opinion polls and to journalists as arrogant and aloof, and too hidebound to the interests of the rich.
Yet even so, more than half the voters in the election’s first round on April 10 chose, among 12 candidates, far-right or far-left politicians— a reflection of widespread anxiety and discontent with mainstream politics. “There is a sense of decline,” Nicolas Becuwe, senior director of Kantar Public in Brussels, said on Thursday, during an online presentation of the polling company’s data across the E.U. “France is the most pessimistic country in all of Europe.
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