Emmanuel Macron has been re-elected as French President.
Gatekeepers News reports that Macron on Sunday, defeated Marine Le Pen to gain a second term victory after a rematch of the 2017 presidential election.
According to projected results from the French news media, working with national pollsters, Macron led challenger Marine Le Pen with more than 58% of the vote.
Shortly after the announced projection, Le Pen conceded noting that she improved her performance from five years ago and will now concentrate on legislative elections for her party. “The game is not completely over,” she told supporters.
In 2017, Macron defeated Le Pen with more than 66% of the vote.
The 44-year-old who built his own political party to run for president in 2017, won again despite a first term beset by protests against his economic policies, the COVID-19 pandemic, and most recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine that roiled diplomatic relations across the globe.
His re-election also dealt a setback to the populist movements that have upended politics across the Western world, from Brexit to the successes of Viktor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the United States.
Macron told Le Pen in their last debate “When one puts back together your project brick by brick, it’s a project that’s about getting out of the EU, even if it doesn’t explicitly say so.”
During a Friday interview on BFM television in France, Macron cast the election as a choice “between leaving or not leaving Europe” and “abandoning or not abandoning the secular republic.”
Le Pen on her part kept echoing the arguments of anti-globalists across the continent, stating that France has surrendered its sovereignty to multilateral organisations like the EU and NATO.
Macron, while addressing a victory rally at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, where his supporters waved French and European flags, vowed to respond “efficiently” to the “anger and disagreement” of voters who chose the far right.
He said, “I know that a number of French people have voted for me today, not to support my ideas but to stop the ideas of the far right.”
Macron further called on supporters to be “kind and respectful” to others, because the country was riven by “so much doubt, so much division … I’m not the candidate of one camp anymore, but the president of all of us.”
