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Le Pen’s loss leaves backers deflated.

Le Pen’s loss leaves backers deflated.

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Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

PARIS — Emmanuel Macron won a second term as president of France, triumphing on Sunday over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, after a campaign where his promise of stability prevailed over the temptation of an extremist lurch.

Projections at the close of voting, which are generally reliable, showed Mr. Macron, a centrist, gaining 58.5 percent of the vote to Ms. Le Pen’s 41.5 percent. His victory was much narrower than in 2017, when the margin was 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent for Ms. Le Pen, but wider than appeared likely two weeks ago.

Speaking to a crowd massed on the Champ de Mars in front of a twinkling Eiffel Tower, a solemn Mr. Macron said his was a victory for “a more independent France and a stronger Europe.” At the same time he acknowledged “the anger that has been expressed” during a bitter campaign and that he had duty to “respond effectively.”

Ms. Le Pen conceded defeat in her third attempt to become president, but bitterly criticized the “brutal and violent methods” of Mr. Macron. She vowed to fight on to secure a large number of representatives in legislative elections in June, declaring that “French people have this evening shown their desire for a strong counter power to Emmanuel Macron.”

At a critical moment in Europe, with fighting raging in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, France rejected a candidate hostile to NATO, to the European Union, to the United States, and to its fundamental values that hold that no French citizens should be discriminated against because they are Muslim.

Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister, said the result reflected “the mobilization of French people for the maintenance of their values and against a narrow vision of France.”

The French do not generally love their presidents, and none had succeeded in being re-elected since 2002. Mr. Macron’s unusual achievement in securing five more years in power reflects his effective stewardship over the Covid-19 crisis, his rekindling of the economy, and his political agility in occupying the entire center of the political spectrum.

Ms. Le Pen, softening her image if not her anti-immigrant nationalist program, rode a wave of alienation and disenchantment to bring the extreme right closer to power than at any time since 1944. Her National Rally party has joined the mainstream, even if at the last minute many French people seem to have voted for Mr. Macron to ensure that France not succumb to the xenophobic vitriol of the darker passages of its history.

Ms. Le Pen is a longtime sympathizer with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whom she visited at the Kremlin during her last campaign in 2017. She would almost certainly have pursued policies that weakened the united allied front to save Ukraine from Russia’s assault, offered Mr. Putin a breach to exploit in Europe, and undermined the European Union, whose engine has always been a joint Franco-German commitment to it.

If Brexit was a blow to unity, a French nationalist quasi-exit, as set out in Ms. Le Pen’s proposals, would have left the European Union on life support. That, in turn, would have crippled an essential guarantor of peace on the continent in a volatile moment.

Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, declared that Mr. Macron’s win was “a vote of confidence in Europe.” Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, congratulated the French leader and called France “one of our closest and most important allies.”

Mr. Scholz and two other European leaders had taken the unusual step this week of making clear the importance of a vote against Ms. Le Pen in an opinion article in the daily newspaper Le Monde. The letter was a reflection of the anxiety in European capitals and Washington that preceded the vote.

“It is the choice between a democratic candidate, who believes that France is stronger in a powerful and autonomous European Union, and a far-right candidate, who openly sides with those who attack our freedom and our democracy — fundamental values ​​that come directly from the French Enlightenment,” they wrote.

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Credit…Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

PARIS — Hundreds of supporters waving French flags and signs in support of President Emmanuel Macron screamed with joy and relief when his face appeared on a large screen facing a sea of blue, white and red in front of the Eiffel Tower.

The crowd screamed, “One, and two, and five more years,” as the song “One More Time,” by the French group Daft Punk, blasted from the speakers. People hugged and kissed each other and danced as the sun started setting on Paris.

“I haven’t slept in three days because I was so anxious. Now I am relieved,” said Sharif Attane, 39, a cook. “I voted for Macron in part because of the war in Ukraine. It was a vote in favor of peace. To me, Marine Le Pen is superficial and misunderstands France. She wants a nation divided in two.”

Jackie Boissard, 60, who works in finance, had a big smile on her face. While thrilled by Mr. Macron’s projected vote tally of 58.2 percent, she said there was still more work to be done.

“I was sure that Macron was going to win,” said Ms. Boissard, who held a French flag. “I’m still afraid of the legislative elections though. The fight is not over.”

Hatem Ayachi, 63, an immigrant from Tunisia, came with two of his four children.

“I voted for Macron for the future of my children,” he said standing near the podium where Mr. Macron was set to speak. “I was not entirely pleased with Macron’s first term, but he will always be better than Marine Le Pen, and that is why I voted for him.”

He added, “We are immigrants, and we were really stressed about Marine Le Pen winning.”

Aida Alami and Adèle Cordonnier

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Credit…Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

PARIS — The crowd of supporters, packed into a large room and holding champagne glasses, chanted “Marine! Marine!” as they waited for the final results of Sunday’s presidential vote. At last, a face appeared on the large screen, revealing who would be France’s president for the next five years. When the screen flashed Emmanuel Macron’s face, the crowd booed.

On Sunday, Mr. Macron defeated Ms. Le Pen, garnering 58.2 percent of the vote to her 41.8 percent, according to early projections by polling firms. The defeat was a blow for Ms. Le Pen, who was running for president for the third time and in recent months had appeared closer than ever to gaining power.

But Sunday’s results were also bittersweet for Ms. Le Pen, who added several percentage points to her vote tally from 2017.

“Tonight’s result is a resounding victory in itself,” she told supporters, as she conceded her defeat in a speech about 10 minutes after the first projections were published, her voice and eyes at first filled with emotion.

Rémi Ulrich, a 29-year-old supporter who was fervently applauding just a few feet from Ms. Le Pen’s stage, said Sunday’s result symbolized “the end of the glass ceiling.”

Some supporters in the crowd had tears in their eyes as the far-right leader delivered her speech. Others halfheartedly waved French flags, at times looking lost.

“I’m terribly disappointed,” said Ghislaine Bernard, 60, adding that Ms. Le Pen had been vilified by the media and the mainstream parties in recent weeks. A longtime Le Pen sympathizer, Ms. Bernard said she would stay at the event for the rest of the night. “Marine Le Pen, I don’t want her to feel alone now,” she said.

Ms. Le Pen gathered her supporters in the affluent 16th arrondissement of Paris, in a gilded complex of pavilions set up at the entrance of the Bois de Boulogne, a large park west of the French capital. The gathering, with its hallways lined by large mirrors and champagne glass pyramids lining the main room, brought out 500 or so supporters, many of them young and in their best clothes, hoping for the best.

Ms. Bernard, who said she had kept a close eye on the polls, said she “expected” Ms. Le Pen to lose. “She’s formidable, but she could not do the impossible,” Ms. Bernard said.

But after conceding defeat, Ms. Le Pen’s tone soon turned offensive, as she vowed to keep the fight going and called on her supporters to turn their sights on June’s parliamentary elections.

“More than ever, I will continue my commitment to France and the French people,” she said, to the cheers of the crowd chanting, “Marine! Marine!”

“The game is not totally over!” she said. “As a consequence, we are launching tonight the big electoral battle for the parliamentary elections!”

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Credit…Thibault Camus/Associated Press

PARIS — Officials across Europe swiftly reacted with a sigh of relief on Sunday after President Emmanuel Macron of France comfortably beat his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen, in the presidential election.

“Together, we will advance France and Europe,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, wrote in French on Twitter.

Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, wrote on Twitter that “we can count on France for five more years,” while Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany said Mr. Macron’s re-election was a “vote of confidence in Europe.”

Mr. Macron’s office said on Sunday that Mr. Scholz had called Mr. Macron to congratulate him. “It is the first call that the president has received and taken, a sign of Franco-German friendship,” his office said.

At home, Jean-Yves Le Drian, Mr. Macron’s foreign minister, told France 2 television that he was “convinced” Mr. Macron would be “up to the challenges that await.”

Final results are not yet published, but French pollsters project that Mr. Macron has won with roughly 58 percent of the vote. Still, his political opponents warned that his next term would have to take into account the simmering anger in the French electorate, as the far right won more of the vote than it has in decades.

“There has never been such a vote of despair,” Christian Jacob, the head of the conservative Républicain party, said on French television.

Roughly 28 percent of the French electorate sat out this round of the election — the highest level in over 50 years in the second round of a presidential vote.

“He is floating in a sea of abstention, and blank or null ballots,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the firebrand leftist who came in a strong third in the first round of the elections early this month, said in a speech on Sunday of Mr. Macron.

Mr. Mélenchon hopes to become prime minister if his party gets a strong majority in the parliamentary elections, to be held in June. “The third round starts tonight,” he said.

Top European leaders had expressed barely veiled alarm at the possibility of a Le Pen victory. Last week, the leaders of Germany, Portugal and Spain had taken the highly unusual step in an opinion article in Le Monde of implicitly urging French voters to reject her.

On Sunday, Christian Lindner, the finance minister in Germany, said a united Europe was the biggest winner. “This choice was a directional choice,” he wrote on Twitter. “It was about fundamental questions of values.”

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain welcomed Mr. Macron’s victory as proof that the French want “a free, strong and just E.U.”

Officials outside of the European Union reacted, as well.

President Volodomyr Zelensky of Ukraine also congratulated Mr. Macron on his victory, calling him a “real friend of Ukraine” on Twitter. “I appreciate his support and I am convinced that we will move forward together toward new shared victories,” he wrote.

And, Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, extended her “warmest congratulations” to Mr. Macron.

“Strong leadership is essential in these uncertain times and your tireless dedication will be much needed to tackle the challenges we are facing in Europe,” Ms. Lagarde wrote on Twitter.

And Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain tweeted that “France is one of our closest and most important allies.”

“I look forward to continuing to work together on the issues which matter most to our two countries and to the world,” Mr. Johnson wrote.

Liz Alderman and Raphael Minder contributed reporting.

Correction: 

April 24, 2022

An earlier version of this article misstated the position of Christine Lagarde. She is the head of the European Central Bank, not the head of the International Monetary Fund.

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Credit…Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

SAINT-DENIS, France — Slowly dragging a shopping bag through the alleys of a bustling market in Saint-Denis, a city in Paris’s northern suburbs, Assina Channa did not hide her growing weariness. She had just left the polling station where she had grudgingly cast her vote for the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron.

“Nothing is going to change,” Ms. Channa, 58, said, stopping for a moment near a stall selling secondhand clothes. “But I had no choice.”

Like many other voters in Saint-Denis, a multicultural place with many residents who are Muslim or from an immigrant background, she said she had voted without conviction for Mr. Macron, only to keep his rival, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, from power.

“At least he doesn’t threaten us like she does,” Ms. Channa, a Muslim of Algerian descent, said, pointing to Ms. Le Pen’s tough stance on immigration and her proposal to ban the Muslim head scarf from public spaces. “But with him, life will continue to be expensive.”

Ms. Channa’s tactical vote on Sunday was the same as the one she cast five years earlier, when Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen were the candidates in that presidential runoff. Her fatigue echoed the apathy that seems to have set in among many voters in Saint-Denis and throughout France, especially on the left, as they feel compelled to once again hold their noses and vote without enthusiasm for anyone but the far right.

Even avowed supporters of Mr. Macron acknowledged that this year’s rematch had an air of déjà vu that could prove dangerous for French democracy.

“People are fed up — they want change,” said Thuy Vy Do Huynh, 41, a start-up founder who praised Mr. Macron’s business policies. She said she was confident Mr. Macron would be re-elected — the latest polls give him a 10 percentage point lead over Ms. Le Pen — but added that she feared people who will reluctantly support him in the runoff would then pour out their anger in street protests.

Voters in Seine-Saint-Denis, the administrative region encompassing Saint-Denis, overwhelmingly backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist leader who finished third in the first round of the presidential election, granting him 50 percent of the vote locally, more than double his score at the national level. In Saint-Denis alone, six out of 10 voters cast a ballot for Mr. Mélenchon.

Eager to woo those left-wing voters, Mr. Macron visited Saint-Denis on Thursday, promising to invest more money in disadvantaged suburbs to improve education, social housing and security. He was accompanied by the area’s socialist mayor, who publicly urged people to back the president, saying in an opinion column on Wednesday: “With Marine Le Pen as president of the Republic, the residents of Seine-Saint-Denis will be the first victims of discrimination and stigmatization.”

Conversations around the open-air market on Sunday in Saint-Denis suggested that voters were likely to follow this advice, but with a growing lassitude.

“Here, we don’t identify with these two candidates,” said Pascale Orellana, a plastic artist, as she was strolling in a public park near Saint-Denis’s gothic basilica, where many French kings are entombed. “The situation is frozen — it’s like the last time. We won’t vote for Macron, we will vote against the Pen.”

“It’s a no-choice vote,” she said.

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Credit…Pool photo by Ludovic Marin

Inauguration ceremonies in France are much smaller affairs than in the United States and do not involve a swearing in. President Emmanuel Macron will likely attend a short event at the Élysée Palace, the president’s residence, and give a speech before being driven up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe to attend a ceremony honoring fallen service members.

Jean Castex, Mr. Macron’s current prime minister, has said he would resign to make way for new faces before parliamentary elections in June. But it is still unclear if or when exactly that might happen — and, if it does, how long it will take Mr. Macron to form a new government.

Now, the political focus is shifting to the parliamentary elections, which are sometimes called the “third round” of the presidential race and will play a crucial role in determining how much leeway Mr. Macron will have to pursue his agenda.

All seats will be up for grabs in the National Assembly, France’s lower and more powerful house of Parliament, in a two-round system of voting. Lawmakers also serve five-year terms.

If Mr. Macron struggles to muster a strong parliamentary majority, it could force him into a “cohabitation” — a situation in which the presidency and the National Assembly are on opposing political sides.

That would compel him to choose a prime minister of a different political party and potentially block much of his domestic agenda. (Foreign policy, which is a presidential prerogative, would remain mostly untouched.)

Ms. Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the firebrand leftist who came in third in the first round of the presidential election, have both appealed to voters to make them that prime minister.

“Tonight we are starting the great legislative electoral battle,” Ms. Le Pen, who gained several percentage points from her showing in the 2017 presidential election, told cheering supporters during her concession speech. “Tonight’s historic score puts our camp in an excellent position to get a large number of seats in June.”

“I will never abandon the French,” she added.

Mr. Mélenchon, in a speech on Sunday, said that “democracy can still give us the means to change course.”

“The third round starts tonight,” he said.

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Credit…Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

Voter turnout in France’s presidential election stood at 63.23 percent at 5 p.m. Sunday, according to the Interior Ministry, the lowest in over two decades.

In 2017, when France last held a presidential election, the 5 p.m. turnout for the second round was 65.30 percent.

While high by many countries’ standards, France’s decreasing voter turnout has become a major source of concern, as a growing number of voters say they feel disconnected from and disillusioned by politics.

Turnout could be key in determining who wins Sunday’s vote. President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, both tried in the runoff campaign to appeal to voters who didn’t like either of them — mainly those on the left who are disappointed that no left-wing candidate made it into the second round, and who could decide to stay home.

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Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

In a pivotal debate on Wednesday, President Emmanuel Macron accused his far-right challenger, Marine Le Pen, of being in the pocket of Russia, and she countered with a withering attack on the “unbearable injustice” of Mr. Macron’s economic measures.

Interrupting each other and accusing each other of lying, they traded barbs on topics like the environment and pension policy for almost three hours, without ever quite delivering a knockout blow.

It was their first face-to-face encounter in a debate since 2017, when Mr. Macron made a mockery of Ms. Le Pen’s incoherent plans to take France out of the eurozone, to such effect that the electoral contest was effectively over. He went on to trounce her.

This time, Ms. Le Pen has dropped plans to leave the European Union and the eurozone as part of a successful attempt to moderate her image, although not the anti-immigrant and nationalist character of her platform. While she suffered through some difficult moments in the debate, appearing lost on the subject of the ballooning debt France incurred in battling Covid-19, she generally held her own.

As in 2017, Mr. Macron seemed best able to marshal the facts on economic issues generally, and when he told Ms. Le Pen that “you never explain how you will finance your reforms,” she seemed to have little by way of an answer.

One of the most pointed clashes came on the issue of head scarves. Ms. Le Pen, who wants to bar women from wearing them in public, called them “a uniform imposed by Islamists” that undermined French values of secularism and gender equality.

Mr. Macron shot back that banning head scarves was an unworkable proposal that would fuel “civil war,” that conflated Islam and extremism and that dishonored France’s values of tolerance.

The vote is being closely watched in part because a Le Pen victory, although improbable, appears possible. It did not seem any less so after the debate, a sharp confrontation of alternating fortunes that in the end had the feel of a draw.

Reporting was contributed by Aurelien Breeden, Constant Méheut, Daphné Anglès and Adèle Cordonnier.

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Credit…James Hill for The New York Times

HARDECOURT-AUX-BOIS, France — Marine Le Pen spent the last two days of her campaign in the deindustrialized, economically struggling areas in the north of France that, along with a Mediterranean stretch in the south, form her strongholds.

Exhorting her core supporters to vote on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen held events in the Somme department, home to towns and villages where her attacks against her rival, Emmanuel Macron, as an “arrogant” president full of “disdain” for ordinary people resonated powerfully.

“To me, Emmanuel Macron is a president who has made the rich richer,” said Gaëtan François, 40, a construction tractor operator and a village councilor, outside the City Hall in Hardecourt-aux-Bois. “Marine Le Pen is the only one to defend the workers.”

In Hardecourt-aux-Bois, a village of 85 people in the Somme, only three people voted for Mr. Macron in the first round earlier this month. Ms. Le Pen got 78 percent of the votes, her highest score nationwide.

The village, like the rest of the region, has drifted rightward in the past decade.

Maurice Clément, 82, a retired truck driver, said he had voted for Socialists most of his life. In 2017, he voted for Ms. Le Pen in the first round, but for Mr. Macron in the runoff because he was worried about the extreme right.

This time, he had no such worries. Mr. Macron’s policies, he said, had plunged France in a “hole,” citing the record government debt accumulated during his presidency. He was angry about Mr. Macron’s proposal to raise the retirement age to 65 from 62 as part of his plans to overhaul the pension system. For those who had done hard manual labor all their lives, retiring at 65 was the equivalent of retiring in “crutches,” he said.

Ms. Le Pen, he said, “is the only choice.”

About 24 miles away, Ham, a town of about 5,000 people, has also shifted rightward in recent years. In the 2012 presidential election, people in Ham voted like the rest of the nation by choosing François Hollande, the Socialist Party candidate, over the center-right Nicolas Sarkozy.

But in 2017, Ham picked Ms. Le Pen over Mr. Macron. Ms. Le Pen won 56 percent of the votes in Ham, compared with only 34 percent nationwide.

On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen was expected to handily defeat Mr. Macron in Ham once again. In the first round of voting two weeks ago, she had 41 percent of the votes, with Mr. Macron getting only 24 percent.

Beyond Ms. Le Pen’s focus on the working class, her longstanding tough talk on crime and immigration appealed to voters like Hubert Bekaert, 68, a retired optician.

“I’m sick of using taxpayer money to house terrorists in prison,” he said, adding that he wanted the death penalty restored. “Marine Le Pen is the only one who’s tough on crime.”

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It would be difficult to question the longstanding anti-immigrant, ethnonationalist credentials of Marine Le Pen, the veteran politician whose family has defined far-right politics in France for the past two generations.

Ms. Le Pen’s established status on the far right allowed her to wage a low-key campaign focusing on the economy and the rising cost of living, and while she appeared to flounder in the early months of the presidential race, the strategy paid off when the war in Ukraine led to an increase in the price of fuel and other goods.

Ms. Le Pen came in a strong second in the first round of voting on April 10, setting up a rematch with President Emmanuel Macron, who soundly beat her in the 2017 runoff.

This time, polls show a much tighter race between the two candidates. Heading into the showdown on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen could count on the new support of voters who backed two other far-right candidates in the first round. She also tried to woo some supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist leader who finished just behind her in the first round, by continuing to promote economic policies that she said would help the working class.

But in the weeks before the runoff, Ms. Le Pen hewed to a strategy of highlighting the negatives of Mr. Macron and building what she called an anti-Macron front.

Voters said that Ms. Le Pen understood the difficulties of everyday French people more than any other candidate, the polls showed, especially in comparison with Mr. Macron. His image as an arrogant, out-of-touch president of the rich was reinforced by recent revelations surrounding his government’s widespread use of McKinsey and other highly paid, politically unaccountable consultants.

In the single presidential debate, a climax in every race for the Élysée Palace, Ms. Le Pen often appeared outmatched by Mr. Macron, especially on economic matters. But her performance was a vast improvement over an extremely shaky appearance in the 2017 debate, which fueled doubts about her competence to lead France.

In an interview last year with The New York Times, Ms. Le Pen said she felt that the French did not know her because of her intense reserve, even though she grew up in the public eye and was preparing for her third run for the presidency.

In an ultimately successful makeover strategy that tried to blunt her image as a far-right ideologue, she began opening up to the news media, talking first about her love of cats and then about traumas suffered growing up with a family name long identified with xenophobia, racism and antisemitism.

She changed her party’s name to the National Rally from the National Front, in an “undemonizing” strategy meant to distance it from its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father.

And she tweaked her party’s positions to try to widen her support beyond the working class, dropping her plan to exit the eurozone, an idea that troubled many middle-class conservatives.

But the core of her anti-immigrant program was little changed, consisting of giving her supporters tax cuts and more services that would be financed by taking them away from immigrants. While she said she made a distinction between Islam and Islamism, she said she would make it illegal for Muslims to wear head scarves in public.

Ms. Le Pen’s campaign also benefited from an overall shift that has pushed France further to the right. More unexpectedly, her image softened further thanks to the candidacy of Éric Zemmour, a television pundit who adopted extreme positions that were to the right of Ms. Le Pen’s.

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PARIS — Five years ago, Emmanuel Macron, a bold upstart with a Bonapartist streak, upended French politics to become president at 39, promising to put an end to the sterile divisions of left and right, fast-forward France into the technological age, and forge a more united and powerful Europe.

The son of two medical doctors from northern France, a product of the country’s elite schools, a glib speaker forever refining ideas, Mr. Macron never lacked for boldness. At a time when revived nationalism had produced Brexit and the Trump presidency, he bet on a strong commitment to the European Union — and swept aside his opponents with an incisive panache.

Europe, and its liberal democratic model, proved to be the fixed point of an otherwise adjustable credo. Mr. Macron began with a strong pro-business push, simplifying the labyrinthine labor code, eliminating a wealth tax, courting foreign investment and vigorously promoting a start-up culture.

A former investment banker in a country with a healthy distrust of capitalism, he inevitably became known as “the president of the rich.” Reforming France is notoriously difficult, as many presidents have found.

Confronted by enormous protests against planned pension overhauls and by the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Macron ended up with a “whatever it costs” policy to support workers through the crisis, declaring at one point that “we have nationalized salaries.” Debt ballooned. But the virus was beaten back; growth shot up to 7 percent this year.

In the end, Macronism, as it’s known here, remains a mystery, an elastic and disruptive political doctrine depending less on content than the charisma of its loquacious creator. The Parliament and political parties often feel marginal.

Mr. Macron’s back-and-forth on many issues — skeptical of nuclear power before he was for it, strongly free-market before discovering “solidarity” — has earned him the sobriquet of the “on the other hand” president.

Yet he is also a radical thinker, a contrarian who will speak his mind, as in 2019 when he said NATO had gone through a “brain death.” The comment reflected his belief that the end of the Cold War should have produced a new strategic architecture in Europe, ideally integrating Russia in some way. He believes passionately that Europe must develop “strategic autonomy” if it is not to be sidelined in the 21st century.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has prodded Europe toward the unity Mr. Macron seeks, even as it has raised the question of whether the president had been naïve in his persistent outreach to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

How, and in the name of what, and against whom, could Russia be “integrated” into European security?

Accused at the beginning of his presidency of aloofness, so much so that he was compared with “Jupiter,” the king of the gods, Mr. Macron learned painfully to listen, especially to those who struggle to get to the end of the month, only to revert to a strange detachment during the current campaign that allowed his longtime rival, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, to turn an election that seemed won for Mr. Macron into a close-run thing.

Still, after a hectic last two weeks of the campaign, during which Mr. Macron scurried around the country trying to show his concern for French people struggling to make ends meet, he appears close to achieving something no French president has managed for two decades: gaining re-election.

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France’s presidents have formidable powers at their disposal, set much of the country’s agenda and are elected directly by the people to five-year terms in a two-round voting system. This year, the first round was held on April 10, and the second round is being held on Sunday.

A candidate who gets an absolute majority of votes in the first round is elected outright, but that has never occurred in the nearly six decades since France started choosing its presidents by a direct popular vote. Instead, a runoff is usually held between the top two candidates.

The presidency is France’s most powerful political office, offering considerable control of domestic and foreign policy in one of the European Union’s most populous and influential member states. Here is what you need to know about the runoff.

President Emmanuel Macron of France is facing Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, in a rematch of their 2017 face-off.

The vote comes after two weeks of intense campaigning and a bruising televised debate between Mr. Macron, who got 27.85 percent of the vote in the first round, and Ms. Le Pen, who received 23.15 percent.

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Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

In 2017, Mr. Macron won handily with nearly two-thirds of the vote. Polls initially gave Mr. Macron only a slight edge, but his lead has grown over the past week, with the latest polls putting him at roughly 55 percent of voting intentions, versus 45 percent for Ms. Le Pen. Still, the race is expected to be much closer this time, as the French tradition of mainstream voters uniting against the far-right looks more precarious than ever.

A victory by Ms. Le Pen, who has softened her tone but not her anti-immigrant, nationalist platform, would reverberate globally.

France, with more than 67 million people, is the world’s seventh-largest economy, the world’s most visited country, one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and a nuclear power. It is a founding member of the European Union and a key driver of its policy.

Right-wing forces have largely won France’s culture wars in recent years, and the head scarf worn by Muslim women was one notable point of contention between Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen.

But surveys show that voters are primarily concerned with the growing cost of living, and economic issues dominated the race. Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen clashed over tax cuts, higher wages and changes in the retirement age. They openly courted voters on the left after Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fiery leftist candidate, got 21.95 percent of the vote in the first round.

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Credit…Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

Broad disillusionment with politics has also emerged as a major source of concern. Voter turnout for the first round of voting was 73.69 percent, high by many countries’ standards but the lowest for a French presidential election since 2002.

On Election Day, the French news media will work with pollsters to publish projected results at 8 p.m. based on preliminary vote counts. That will give a good indication of who is expected to win. But if the race is close, the winner might not become clear until later. Official results will be available on the Interior Ministry website.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/24/world/french-election-runoff-results/le-pens-loss-leaves-backers-deflated