ROYE, France – There is no doubt that France’s President Emmanuel Macron won a convincing reelection on Sunday against his far-right challenger Marine Le Pen. Mr Macron scored a whopping 17 points gain, becoming the first French leader to be re-elected for a second term in 20 years.
According to many, the electoral system worked as it was intended, with nearly 60 percent of voters uniting to defend themselves against the xenophobic and nationalist far-right widely regarded as a threat to French democracy.
That is, unless you are a supporter of Mrs Le Pen, who was blocked for the second time in a row on the last lap.
“I think we have another five years of crisis, probably worse, because people are just tired of it,” Sébastien Denneulin, 46, a Le Pen supporter, said Monday morning in Roye, a northern far-right stronghold.
Even though Ms. Le Pen has taken her party to the mainstream and firmly entrenched her in the political establishment, her supporters say they are frustrated by a lack of representation in the political system.
The far right enjoyed its strongest ever polls at the polls on Sunday, as Ms. Le Pen expanded its appeal to include wallet issues important in parts of the country, such as this northern region, where over the past two generations, voters have shifted to the far right from the political left combined. with deindustrialization.
The challenge for Mr Macron now will be how to lure the 41.5 percent of voters who voted for Ms Le Pen back into the political fold – and the roughly 28 percent who chose not to vote at all. Despite the president’s clear victory, the election results masked numerous challenges that could make his next five years as president even more tumultuous than the last.
As French news media organizations mapped the national second-round split, they showed an ever-widening and deepening rift along the French equivalent of the US blue and red states.
In the reddest areas of France, there was frustration that Mrs. Le Pen was again defeated and a strong sense that her supporters were still excluded from the political system.
In Roye, some people gathered in the QG brasserie expressed their anger when they heard of the results on their smartphones on Sunday evening. A man set fire to his voter card.
Tony Rochon, 39, a roofer, said he had voted for a Le Pen all his life – either Marine or her father, Jean-Marie. But each time, he said, other political parties had united to deny a Le Pen victory in the presidential race. Then the same thing had happened in the parliamentary elections – also a two-round system – effectively marginalizing Ms Le Pen’s influence in parliament.
In 2017, for example, while Ms Le Pen won 34 percent of the vote in the presidential election, her party won just eight seats in parliament – not even enough to form a parliamentary group.
That year, Mr Macron promised to introduce proportional representation in parliament, which experts say would better reflect the political beliefs of the population. But he didn’t keep his promise.
He and his wife, Adelaide Rochon, 33, a dental assistant who has also always voted for Ms Le Pen’s party, said they believed the vote had been rigged.
“We don’t know a single person around us who voted for Macron,” Ms Rochon said. “It’s impossible that he won.”
Not impossible actually.
In Roye, a town of 6,000, two out of three voters supported Ms Le Pen in the second round. But nationwide, Macron drew many votes — 47 percent, according to one poll — not because people supported him per se, but because they joined the so-called Republican Front against the far right, whose politics remain anathema to a majority of the French, despite Ms. Le Pen’s continued efforts to improve and soften her image.
For others, such as Madeleine Rosier, a member of the left-wing France Unbowed, choosing between Mr Macron and what she saw as an unacceptable far-right candidate was no choice at all. She did not vote on Sunday after voting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran leftist who finished third in the first round.
“I didn’t want to give Emmanuel Macron legitimacy,” she said.
The abstention rate — the highest in a runoff since 1969 — reflected widespread disillusionment with the political system that sent protesters from cities like Roye to the Champs-Élysées in Paris as part of the anti-government Yellow Vest movement in 2018, its biggest political crisis. of Mr Macron’s first term.
That anger persists in many parts of the country. In another degree of political disillusionment, more than three million people cast blank or invalid votes — and that doesn’t include the 13.7 million who chose not to vote at all.
Étienne Ollion, a sociologist and professor at the Polytechnique Engineering School, said the importance of such voters and those who reluctantly supported Macron to keep Ms Le Pen from power, as well as the level of abstention gives Mr Macron “relatively limited legitimacy”.
The election results underlined a growing sense of “democratic fatigue and democratic rupture” in France, Mr Ollion said.
Given Macron’s unfulfilled promise to reform Parliament, Chloé Morin, a political scientist at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a Paris-based think tank, said there were doubts about Mr Macron’s ability to account for this extremely divided political landscape and opposition parties that will inevitably, in all logic, be underrepresented” in Parliament.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, an ally of Mr Macron and a former Green MEP, said in an interview that “an unfair French electoral system” had led to a government ignoring the political opposition and various actors of society.
“To have a Parliament where someone who gets 42 percent of the vote has only about 20 lawmakers, that’s unacceptable,” he said, referring to Ms Le Pen.
Shortly after Macron was re-elected on Sunday, there were immediate signs that discontent with French democracy would mark his second term.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in Paris and other major cities to oppose Macron’s second term. The protests were marred by violent clashes with police, who fired tear gas into Paris to disperse the crowd.
Protesters in Paris gathered from the city center to the grand Place de la République and sang a song that came from the Yellow Vest movement: “We’re here, even if Macron doesn’t want it, we’re here!”
By midnight, police had cleared the Place de la République of protesters. But they had scribbled a warning in red on the large statue of Marianne, an emblem of the French Republic, in the center of the square: “Beware of revenge when all the poor people rise.”
Norimitsu Onishic reported by Roye, and Constant Meheut from Paris.
