French vote for Macron, Le Pen shuts out mainstream politics

PARIS — French voters shut out the country’s political mainstream from the presidency for the first time in the country’s modern history, and on Monday found themselves being courted across the spectrum for the runoff election.

The May 7 runoff will be between the populist Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, and French politicians on the moderate left and right immediately urged voters to block Le Pen’s path to power.

The defeated far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, pointedly refused to do the same, and Le Pen’s National Front is hoping to do the once unthinkable and peel away voters historically opposed to a party long tainted by racism and anti-Semitism.

“The voters who voted for Mr. Melenchon are angry voters. They can be in agreement with us,” said Steeve Brios, a vice-president of Le Pen’s National Front party. He said they express a choice “outside the system.”

Choosing inside the system is no longer an option for French voters, who rejected the two mainstream parties that have alternated power for decades in favour of Le Pen and the untested Macron, who has never held elected office and who founded his own political movement just last year.

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Socialist candidate Manuel Valls, whose party holds a majority in the legislature and whose President Francois Hollande is the most unpopular in modern French record-keeping, got just 6 per cent. The conservative candidate fared marginally better, coming in third with just shy of 20 per cent of the vote.

“We are in a phase of decomposition, demolition, deconstruction,” said Valls. “We didn’t do the work — intellectual, ideological and political — on what the left is, and we paid the price.”

Both centre-right and centre-left fell in behind Macron, whose optimistic vision of a tolerant France and a united Europe with open borders is a stark contrast to Le Pen’s darker, inward-looking “French-first” platform that calls for closed borders, tougher security, less immigration and dropping the shared euro currency to return to the French franc.

Le Pen offers an alternative for anyone skeptical of the European Union and France’s role in it, said Louis Aliot, the vice-president of the National Front party.

“I’m not convinced that the French are willing to sign a blank check to Mr. Macron,” he said.

But Macron’s party spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, said the far-right candidate is hardly a vector of change.

“She’s been in the political system for 30 years. She inherited her father’s party and we will undoubtedly have Le Pens running for the next 20 years, because after we had the father, we have the daughter and we will doubtless have the niece,” he said. “So she is in a truly bad position to be talking about the elites and the people.”

Macron came in first in Sunday’s vote, with just over 23 per cent; Le Pen had 21 per cent; Melenchon and losing conservative candidate Francois Fillon each had 19 per cent. Fillon, a former prime minister, bested the former Trotskyist by just 94,998 votes.

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Ganley reported from Henin-Beaumont. Lori Hinnant and Thomas Adamson contributed from Paris.

Sylvie Corbet And Elaine Ganley, The Associated Press