Europe exhaled tonight. The Earth did not move. Emmanuel Macron remains on course to win a second term as President of France. But in Round one of the presidential elections, he was run close by Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally, who could still come from behind in Round Two of the contest, in two weeks’ time, to register the biggest electoral upset in the history of the Fifth Republic.
According to the semi-official exit poll conducted by the market research group Ipsos, Macron won 28.5 per cent of the vote against 23.6 per cent for Le Pen.
The turnout was just under 74 per cent – somewhat lower than in 2017. Valérie Pécresse, the candidate for the centre-right Republicans, ended up with a mere 4.8 per cent of the vote – the worst-ever performance by a Gaullist contender – but still did better than Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, on behalf of the once-mighty Socialists, who could only manage a derisory 1.8 per cent.
