PARIS — French voters shut out the country’s political mainstream from the presidency for the first time in the country’s modern history, and on Monday found themselves being courted across the spectrum for the runoff election.
The May 7 runoff will be between the populist Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, and French politicians on the moderate left and right immediately urged voters to block Le Pen’s path to power.
The defeated far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, pointedly refused to do the same, and Le Pen’s National Front is hoping to do the once unthinkable and peel away voters historically opposed to a party long tainted by racism and anti-Semitism.
“The voters who voted for Mr. Melenchon are angry voters. They can be in agreement with us,” said Steeve Brios, a vice president of Le Pen’s National Front party. He said they express a choice “outside the system.”
Choosing inside the system is no longer an option for French voters, who rejected the two mainstream parties that have alternated power for decades in favor of Le Pen and the untested Macron, who has never held elected office and who founded his own political movement just last year. Turnout was 78 percent.
Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon, whose party holds a majority in the legislature and whose President Francois Hollande is the most unpopular in modern French record-keeping, got just 6 percent. The conservative candidate fared marginally better, coming in third with just shy of 20 percent of the vote.
“We are in a phase of decomposition, demolition, deconstruction,” said former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls. “We didn’t do the work — intellectual, ideological and political — on what the left is, and we paid the price.”
Both center-right and center-left fell in behind Macron, whose optimistic vision of a tolerant France and a united Europe with open borders is a stark contrast to Le Pen’s darker, inward-looking “French-first” platform that calls for closed borders, tougher security, less immigration and dropping the shared euro currency to return to the French franc.
European stock markets surged on the open as investors welcomed the first-round results, with Macron favored to win. German Chancellor Angela Merkel wished Macron “all the best for the next two weeks.”
Merkel’s chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, tweeted that “the result for Emmanuel Macron shows: France AND Europe can win together! The center is stronger than the populists think!“
Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, made it to the second round against Jacques Chirac in 2002 and was crushed. Many commentators expect the same fate for his daughter, but she has already drawn far more support than he ever did and she’s transformed the party’s once-pariah image.
Le Pen offers an alternative for anyone skeptical of the European Union and France’s role in it, said Louis Aliot, the vice president of the National Front party.
“I’m not convinced that the French are willing to sign a blank check to Mr. Macron,” he said. — AFP
