Marine Le Pen

If Macron's win is confirmed then it would make him the first French president in two decades to win a second term.

If Macron's win is confirmed then it would make him the first French president in two decades to win a second term. But that support dissipated in the days prior to the first round of voting on Apr. 10, as French citizens focused heavily on domestic affairs and soaring inflation. In a two-hour TV debate Wednesday, Macron called out Le Pen's previous ties with Russia and President Vladimir Putin, accusing her of being dependent on Moscow. Turnout on Sunday was 2 percentage points lower than the 2017 election, according to the Interior Ministry. Immediately after the projections, Le Pen spoke to her supporters in Paris and accepted defeat. The 2022 campaign was set against the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a cost of living crisis in France, a surge in support for the far-left among younger generations and suggestions of widespread voter apathy.

Russia's strategic partnership with the French far right has deep roots that long predate the Putin-Le Pen liaison.

Since then, Marine Le Pen has become one of the darlings of Russian television. The Kremlin has long had an interest in gaining allies with the potential to act as an echo chamber for its worldview. At an ideological level, the French Catholic, monarchist and collaborationist right has always held the image of the eternal, czarist and Orthodox Russia close to heart. The FN was also in need of financial support, and here again Russia played a central role. As early as 1968, Le Pen's father and president of the party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, welcomed the Soviet Russian nationalist and antisemitic painter Ilya Glazunov, who had come to Paris as part of a Soviet delegation in the hope of painting a portrait of Gen. Charles de Gaulle. After the French president declined the offer, Glazunov ended up drawing a portrait of Le Pen himself. The links of the Rassemblement National (known until 2018 as the Front National, FN) with Russia are long-standing.

Emmanuel Macron has hacked away at civil liberties, with heightened police repression and ministers promising to root out “Islamo-leftism.

In the April 20 presidential debate, however, Le Pen again insisted that she would use Article 11 of the constitution to bypass the official constitutional reform process. On the erosion of democratic institutions and rights, the response is no different. The article stipulates, however, that a referendum must result in a consultation from the government in Parliament — a detail that De Gaulle ignored in 1962. One of her main propositions is the establishment via referendum of what the far-right calls “national priority,” institutionalizing a hierarchy of rights between French citizens and foreigners in employment, housing, and social welfare. The 2017 turning of the state of emergency into law, the 2018 “Collomb law” on immigration and asylum, the 2021 “ global security law,” the 2021 law on “ Islamic separatism,” the dissolution of associations, and Macron’s cajoling of police forces have only accelerated this trend. Le Pen plans to kick off her term with a series of attacks on France’s constitutional architecture. “For someone with the luxuries that you have,” a woman in the audience commented, “I find that your position is irresponsible.” Her propositions on purchasing power, mainly to achieved through tax rebates, are a reminder of the Reaganite origins of the 1980s National Front. And he surely can’t count on votes from the Left. According to an internal consultation by Mélenchon’s France Insoumise released on April 17, 38 percent planned to cast a null ballot, expressing their discontent at the runoff, while 29 percent would abstain entirely. The book stated in clearer form what was already one of the central threads of The Story of Your Stupidity: Bégaudeau’s abstention from the last Le Pen–Macron face-off. With a keen eye for timing, the anti-capitalist, Christian-inflected magazine Limite chose this moment to host a public discussion with François Bégaudeau. A novelist, filmmaker, and essayist, Bégaudeau is one of the few great polymaths in contemporary French culture, a keen observer whose unpretentious novels channel a frank realism. His controversial 2019 essay, The Story of Your Stupidity, pillories the moral pretensions of what Bégaudeau now calls the “cool bourgeoisie”: the upper-middle-class Macronists who go to such ends to distinguish themselves from crass reactionaries like the Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour ilk.

Le Pen also spoke out against sanctions on Russian energy supplies and faced scrutiny during the election campaign over her previous friendliness with the ...

Macron went into the vote with a sizeable lead in polls but unable to be sure of victory from a fractured, anxious and tired electorate. Appealing to working-class voters struggling with surging prices, Le Pen has vowed that bringing down the cost of living would be her priority if elected. The war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic battered Macron's first term, as did months of violent protests against his economic policies. Five years ago, Macron won a sweeping victory to become France's youngest president at 39. Polling agencies' projections released as the last voting stations closed said Macron was on course to beat Le Pen by a double-digit margin. Macron's rival, far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen, quickly conceded Sunday night.

France began voting in a presidential runoff election Sunday in a race between between incumbent Emmanuel Macron and far-right politician Marine Le Pen.

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