Macron Wins But So Does Le Pen

Macron won the second round of the presidential election in France, as expected. Of course, with the upset over Brexit and the US presidential race, ‘expected’ has taken on a meaning tinged with an understanding that nothing is expected to definitely be ‘as expected’ any longer.

A lot of voters entered a null vote, indicating that they didn’t like either candidate. That is not an invalid vote as in UK elections, but a positive vote indicating a preference.

That aside, Marine Le Pen got 10,644,118 votes (33.9% of the vote) against Macron’s 20,753,797 votes (66.1% of the vote).

In the 2002 election, Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front took 4,804,713 votes in the first round.

In the run-off Jacques Chirac took 25,537,956 votes, representing 82.21% of the votes cast and Jean-Marie Le Pen took 5,525,032 votes, representing 17.79% of the votes.

So Marine Le Pen has doubled the votes and the percentage. Well yes, she might have gained a lower percentage if those null votes had gone to Macron.

But the raw numbers would still show that between 2002 and today, Le Pen the daughter – leader of the National Front – got twice as many votes as her father did fifteen years ago.

And that is a bad result for France and for the world.