By Joshua Cole
Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South) – In the second round of the French presidential election, extremism lost.
It is less clear what won.
Estimates after the polls closed had Emmanuel Macron winning with 63.7 percent of the vote. National Front candidate Marine Le Pen took approximately 36.3 percent.
That’s less than the 40 percent some polls gave her as recently as two weeks prior to the vote, but more than twice as much as the 17.8 percent her father, Jean Marie Le Pen, received in his 2002 face-off against former president Jacques Chirac.
Turnout was lower than any presidential election since 1969, with 23.5 percent of registered voters staying home. What’s more, 12 percent of those who did show up submitted a blank ballot, more than double the number of blank votes in previous elections.
Macron has won the presidency, but he has yet to demonstrate that he can rally a majority of the French behind a coherent set of policies or attract a majority in Parliament.
Getting to work
The last-minute revelation that Macron’s campaign organization “En Marche!” – meaning “Let’s get to work!” – had been the target of a “massive and coordinated hacking operation” seems to have had little effect on the outcome.
Approximately 14.5 gigabytes of emails and documents from Macron’s campaign appeared online only hours before the beginning of the traditional 44-hour media silence before the polls open.
Macron’s campaign immediately announced that false documents had been included in the release. The identity of the hackers remains under investigation, but some are already pointing at Russia.
The hacking attack, coming on the heels of similar attempts to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in November 2016, was not a complete surprise.
It indicates the extent to which democracies throughout the world are subject to manipulation by outside forces. This is the new normal.
Macron’s promised reforms
Macron’s plans for his presidency rest almost entirely on his plans for economic reform. Key initiatives in the weeks to come will include a reform of the labor code designed to make it easier for employers to hire and fire workers and simplification of the regulations affecting small businesses.
He has promised to shrink the number of state employees and establish stronger ethics rules for the public sector. He will also look to reinforce European cooperation through partnership with Germany.
The voters’ choice of Macron was a resounding defeat for Marine le Pen, whose extremism became more pronounced in the final days of the election. With her poll numbers declining, she clearly decided to go for the jugular.
Her aggressive attacks and mocking tone during the televised debate on May 3 broke a long-established tradition of more genteel self-presentation in such events. She accused Macron of being “the cherished child of the system and of elites” and “the candidate of savage globalization.” Macron responded by accusing her of “permanently lying” about her own positions.
For years now, Le Pen has been saying that she “purged the devils” from the French National Front, the racist and xenophobic party founded by her father, Jean Marie Le Pen.
Her father was well-known in the 1980s and 1990s for minimizing the place of the Holocaust in the history of World War II. Marine Le Pen attempted to move beyond this sort of controversy after she took over the party in 2009.
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