French elections

As expected, center-right French President Emmanuel Macron won the second term by defeating far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the runoff of the 2022 presidential elections on March 24. Macron got 58.5 percent of the votes while Le Pen bagged 41.5 percent.

Macron is the first French president to win re-election since Jacques Chirac in 2002; his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande had left office after only one term.

Even though Macron won by a margin of nearly 17 percent against Le Pen, it was the best result for a far-right candidate. Le Pen gained nearly 2.7 million more votes compared to the 2017 elections while Macron lost 2 million votes.

In the 2017 runoff between the same two candidates, Macron polled nearly 66 percent of the votes. The election results clearly show that the support for the far-right has increased in recent years, and it seems to have consolidated its position and support base.

Le Pen narrowly edged past far-left candidate Jean Luc Melenchon in the first round. Melenchon got 22 percent of the votes in the first round and missed out on the runoff with a narrow margin of just 1.2 percent. The Left once again missed an opportunity to put forward a joint candidate to defeat Le Pen in the first round; in total the Left got nearly 30 percent.

Melenchon as a joint left candidate could have qualified for the runoff against Macron. But leftist parties failed to agree on a single candidate and thus paved the way for Marine Le Pen to contest against Macron in the runoff. This result is disappointing for progressives who were expecting to come second and face Macron in the second round.

In the absence of a left-wing candidate in the second round, many leftist voters supported Macron against Le Pen. Forty-two percent of leftist or progressive voters supported Macron in the second round. Macron lacked the active and enthusiastic support he had enjoyed in 2017. His pro-capitalist neoliberal economic policies disappointed many working people and left-wing voters.

The first round of presidential elections was held on April 10. Twelve candidates contested the first round of presidential elections but only three candidates got more than 10 percent votes. Macron, Le Pen, and Melenchon got more than 20 percent of the votes. Since none of them received more than 50 percent of the votes in the first round, the top two candidates Macron and Le Pen faced each other in a runoff on April 24. The turnout was around 72 percent, the lowest in 20 years.

Both the right-wing capitalist Republicans and the Socialist Party-dominated French politics for decades. The Republicans' Valerie Pecresse came in fifth with around 5 percent of votes, while the Socialists' Anne Hidalgo came 10th with a record-breaking low for the party at 2 percent. This is the worst result for socialists in its history. They got a combined vote of just 7 percent. Like many other social democratic parties in Europe, the socialists in France lost significant support among workers and the middle class over the years. The neoliberal pro-market economic policies adopted by the socialists after the collapse of the Soviet Union proved costly for the party.

So at the end it was a contest between a rightwing, pro-market neoliberal capitalist Macron on the one hand, and a far-right nationalist, anti-immigration and anti-European Union capitalist Le Pen on the other hand.

Young people overwhelmingly voted for Macron – 61 percent of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 years voted for him. Macron also enjoyed solid support among the old as more than 71 percent of voters in their 60s and 70s voted for him.

Marine Le Pen was backed by middle-aged voters. The majority of 40–60-year-old voters cast their ballots for her. Big cities supported Macron, while rural areas and small towns went behind far-right Le Pen. For instance, Macron bagged 85 percent votes from the French capital Paris while Le Pen just got 15 percent votes. Macron did well in the west of France, the Ile-de-France region, the east, and Occitanie where the most urban population lives.

Marine le Pen did well in the south-east of France, the north, and the deindustrialised east, in the eastern periphery of the Paris region as well as in the south-west, and made a breakthrough in Corsica and overseas regions where people mostly live in villages and small towns.

The majority of rich, upper, and middle-class sections of the population supported Macron as did the majority of graduates and people earning more than 3,000 euros a month.

On the other side, the majority of low-income and less educated sections of the population voted for Le Pen; 56 percent of people earning less than 1,300 euros per month voted for her while 57 percent of employees, 67 percent of workers, and 64 percent of the unemployed also voted for her.

Many working class and young people also abstained from the runoff. The abstentions reached a record high of 28 percent. A record number of voters had abstained in the 1969 presidential elections when abstentions reached an all-time high of 31 percent.

Unemployed youth and many workers are not happy with their economic situation and lack of decent jobs. For the working-class youth, high inflation, the rising cost of living, fewer job opportunities, the housing crisis, and falling incomes are real issues of concern. They want better health facilities, an increase in wages, and a lower cost of living.

The Macron victory is a sign of relief not only for French capitalists but also for EU leaders. Far-right Le Pen's victory could have been a nightmare for EU leaders. She is Euro-sceptic and staunchly anti-EU. Her victory could have been a devastating blow to the EU project.

The writer is a freelance journalist.