Emmanuel Macron fights back and wins the first round the presidential elections in France. Macron received about 28% of the vote in the election, compared to 23% for his main opponent, Marine Le Pen.
Looking ahead to the second round, the incumbent French president needs the votes needed to defeat candidate Le Pen, but experts warn Macron will not find it easy to win the next election on April 24.
To analyze the first results of the elections, Antenna 3 news He spoke to Ignacio Molina, professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and principal researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute.
According to the researcher, Le Pen’s result, which has caught up with Macron since 2017, confirms the “discomfort in Western democracies” that “transforms the traditional left-right axis of competition for one between those who feel comfortable”. an open, globalized and European-influenced world” and another among those who “consider themselves disconnected because they feel abandoned”.
Fear of the advance of the extreme right
This first round was marked with an a large abstention, especially among boys. For this reason, the losing parties are demanding that Macron remain in the Elysée Palace in a kind of cordon sanitaire against the extreme right.
“The polls say Macron is likely to win because Fear reigns in much of France that Le Pen comes to power,” stressed Molina. In this regard, he also clarified that the leader of the National Group, although she has “toned down her approaches a lot” in recent years, continues to “send a strong anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic and reactionary message”.
What happens in the second round?
Everything will depend on how voters mobilize. “In principle, it is difficult for Le Pen to arrive at the Elysée now, but its image is becoming more and more normalized and when the French dynamic has stopped being left-right to become that kind of centrist party against Le Pen and its opposition represents, it is not excluded that sooner or later such an option will reign, as has already happened in Italy, the United States and some Eastern European countries,” the UAM professor clarified.