Emmanuel Macron is the eighth and the youngest president of the Fifth Republic, winning an estimated 65pc of the vote in the second round of voting. It caps an astonishing rise for the 39-year-old former investment banker who only founded his En Marche! party in April last year.
The news was greeted with delirium by his many supporters who had gathered throughout the day at the place des Pyramides at the Louvre in the centre of Paris in expectation of victory.
There was never likely to be any upset with the polls predicting a comfortable Macron win from the moment he and Marine Le Pen finished first and second in the first round of voting a fortnight ago. The last poll on Friday, before campaigning officially ended, put Macron on 61.5pc and Le Pen on 38.5pc.
The fact that the National Front leader polled fewer votes than predicted will be greeted with joy by her political opponents although her 34pc share of the vote [more than 10m voters] represents the biggest electoral gain in the far right’s history. Nonetheless it will be seen by some within the party as a slight disappointment. In an interview last week Marion Marechal-Le Pen, one of only two National Front MPs, said ‘if we obtain 40pc, it will be an enormous victory’.
They failed, but the fact that one in three voters chose Le Pen, whose vision of France is utterly at odds with Macron’s, reveals the deep divisions afflicting the country. The rate of abstention was 25pc, the highest level since the 1969 election. Le Pen reacted quickly to her defeat, saying she had called Macron to ‘wish him success in the face of the immense challenges that face him’.
Macron, who is scheduled to join his supporters at the Louvre later this evening, should enjoy his success while he can for the size of the challenge that awaits him is monumental, as acknowledged by his spokesman Christophe Castaner. ‘The French are waiting on Emmanuel Macron’s words, his pledges and his actions,’ he said. ‘These times are serious. Everything starts this evening and expectations are high.’
Those expectations are to heal what the French press describe as ‘les fractures francaises’, a country split in two between the optimistic and the pessimistic, between the nationalists and the globalists and between the winners and losers in the 21st Century. France’s unemployment rate is 10pc, rising to 24pc among the young, and the country’s debt to GDP ratio is nearly 100pc. Islamic terror attacks are being thwarted on a weekly basis and the police are exhausted, angry and demoralised. If Macron doesn’t act quickly and dynamically then the fractures will widen to chasms, and chaos is likely to ensue. His first job will be to win a majority in next month’s crucial legislatives election when the country votes again, this time to elect the 577 MPs who will sit in the National Assembly.
Writing these words from Vichy, I glimpsed this fracture this morning as I walked around the spa town whose faded splendour symbolises France’s decline. The Parc des Sources once welcomed the famous and fashionable at the heigh of the Belle Époque but the 700 metres of decorative covered walkway are as worn as the French people.
The assistant manager of my hotel, a dapper young man in his mid-20s with a hipster beard and a trendy waistcoat, told me he would be voting in the afternoon once he’d finished his shift. I hardly needed to ask for whom. Macron, he told me, had youth and energy on his side. He and his friends were all En Marche! supporters and were confident he would fulfil his promise to ‘renew’ France.
In a street running parallel to the Parc des Sources I encountered another young man, what the French call an SDF [Sans Domicile Fixe]. The number of homeless people has risen fifty percent in the last ten years and this handsome young man was stoically enduring the soft drizzle of a cool Sunday morning. He was articulate, lucid and yet utterly without hope, for himself and France. He told me he wouldn’t be voting. What was the point? he said. They’re all the same: Macron, Le Pen, Hollande, Fillon, Melenchon. They make their promises and then they break them, and life for people like me stays just as it is. I asked him if he thought that Macron, if he won, might renew France. He shook his head wearily. I put a couple of euros into his paper cup and wished him ‘bon courage’. He, France and Macron need it.
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