French President Macron is marginally ahead against the Far-right Le Pen in the first round of the French elections
France is poised for a rematch of the 2017 presidential election run-off with centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen once again advancing to the final after first-round voting on Sunday.
But the 2022 race has so far been anything but a replay of the contest Macron won five years ago. And the final result when all votes are counted on April 24 is all the more uncertain for it.
Macron is marginally ahead
Macron topped the first-round contest, winning 27.6 percent of the vote, according to Ipsos/Sopra Steria estimates late Sunday evening, ahead of Le Pen’s 23 percent score.
Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon rode a late surge – and an appeal for leftists to vote tactically – to 22.2 percent, narrowly falling short of a place in the final.
The rest of the field finished way behind, a single-digit peloton led by hardline pundit-turned-politician Éric Zemmour on 7.2 percent.
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Low voter turnout
The mainstream parties that have lost momentum as they traded tenancies at the Élysée Palace for decades until Macron came to power each fell to disastrous defeat.
The French show their distaste for the current level of politicians with a low voter turnout.
Les Républicains candidate Valérie Pécresse scored 4.8 percent for fourth place, while Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo’s 1.7 percent put her in a humiliating 10th.
Voter turnout was remarkably low in the first round of French elections. Some 26 percent of registered voters elected to stay home for the first round, four points up on 2017 and uncomfortably close to the 2002 record of 28.4 percent.
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