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 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. The mainstream parties that had traded tenancies at the Élysée Palace for decades until Macron came to power each fell to disastrous defeat; 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. 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.
On the surface, the results look like a rubberstamp of poll results stretching back years portending of a rematch of the 2017 final. Then as now, Macron topped Le Pen. Indeed, both on Sunday topped their scores from five years ago, with Macron more than three…
Source : france24
