French President Emmanuel Macron was in the pole position to win re-election today in France’s presidential runoff, yet his lead over far-right rival Marine Le Pen depends on one major uncertainty: voters who decide to stay home.
A victory in the runoff vote would make Macron the first French president in 20 years to win a second term.
All opinion polls in the past few days converge toward a victory for the 44-year-old pro-European centrist — yet the margin over his nationalist rival appears uncertain, varying from 6 to 15 percentage points, depending on the poll.
Photo: AP
Polls also forecast a possibly record-high number of people who either vote blank or stay at home and do not vote at all in the second and final round.
The April 10 first-round vote eliminated 10 other presidential candidates. Who becomes France’s next leader would largely depend on what people who backed those losing candidates do today.
The question is a hard one, especially for leftist voters who dislike Macron but do not want to see Le Pen in power either. A second term for Macron relies in part on their mobilization, prompting the French leader to issue multiple appeals to leftist voters in the past few days.
“Think about what British citizens were saying a few hours before Brexit or [people] in the United States before [former US president Donald] Trump’s election happened: ‘I’m not going, what’s the point?’ I can tell you that they regretted it the next day,” Macron said this week on France 5 television.
“So if you want to avoid the unthinkable ... choose for yourself,” he urged hesitant French voters.
The two rivals appeared combative in the final days before today’s election, including clashing on Wednesday in a one-on-one televised debate.
Macron said that a loan Le Pen’s party received in 2014 from a Czech-Russian bank made her unsuitable to deal with Moscow amid its invasion of Ukraine.
Le Pen’s campaign this time has sought to appeal to voters struggling with surging food and energy prices amid the fallout of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Political analyst Marc Lazar, head of the History Center at Sciences Po, told reporters that he thinks that Macron is going to win again.
Le Pen “has this lack of credibility,” he said.
However, if Macron is re-elected, “there is a big problem,” he added. “A great number of the people who are going to vote for Macron, they are not voting for this program, but because they reject Marine Le Pen.”
He said that means Macron would face a “big level of mistrust” in the country.
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