France’s presidential election: The second round in detail
mmanuel macron won the second and final round of France’s presidential election on April 24th, taking a projected 59% of the vote against Marine Le Pen’s 41%. He is the country’s first leader to be re-elected since Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist, in 2002, and the first to have governed with a parliamentary majority in his first term and then to win re-election since the fifth republic was established by Charles De Gaulle in 1958.
The result represents another repudiation of Ms Le Pen’s nationalist populism. The margin of victory, however, is smaller than in 2017, when the two also went head-to-head and Mr Macron triumphed with 66% of the vote.
Round two results by commune
Mr Macron’s votes were again concentrated in urban areas: he won landslides in cities including Lyon, Paris and Toulouse, and also did well in the north-west. He picked up support from left-leaning cities, even those in the south-west that had supported the radical-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round. Ms Le Pen performed strongly in poorer, more rural areas and in regions of industrial decline in the north and east, as well as in her party’s traditional stronghold in the south-east, where worries about immigration are strong and a large retired population tends to vote on the right.
