Emmanuel Macron has won the first round of the French election and far-right rival Marine Le Pen will fight him for the presidency for a second time.
“Make no mistake, nothing is decided,” he told cheering supporters.
In the end, he won a convincing first-round victory, but opinion polls suggest the run-off could be much closer.
Ms Le Pen called on every non-Macron voter to join her and “put France back in order”.
With 97% of the results counted, Emmanuel Macron had 27.35% of the vote, Marine Le Pen 23.97% and Jean-Luc Mélenchon 21.7%.
Kingmaker on far left
Veteran far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon polled even better than five years ago and now has the unlikely role of kingmaker.
“You must not give a single vote to Marine Le Pen,” he warned his supporters, but unlike other candidates, he pointedly did not back the president instead. Later in the evening, Mélenchon activists gathered outside his campaign HQ thinking he might even come second, but it was not to be.
Making up more than a fifth of the vote, Mélenchon voters could decide the final round of this election, yet many of them may just sit the second round out and abstain.
Twelve candidates were in the running, but these were the only three who polled more than 10%. Many voters appeared to embrace the idea of tactical or “useful” voting, deciding that the other nine candidates had no hope of making the run-off.
Several of the nine had little chance anyway, but the 2022 presidential election will be partly remembered for the disaster that befell the two old parties that used to run France, the Republicans and Socialists. They sank almost without trace, with Socialist Anne Hidalgo falling below 2%.
It was only a few months ago that Valérie Pécresse was still in the race for the right-wing Republicans. She performed so badly, her party could not even scrape the 5% needed to claim its election costs.
This is potentially terrible news for a party already tearing itself apart. Parties that fail to reach 5% only get €800,000 (£670,000) of their campaign funding covered by the state, and the Republicans will have paid out far more than that.
Run-off campaign starts now
The battle for votes now starts in earnest. Marine Le Pen can count on supporters of Eric Zemmour, whose more hardline nationalism gave him fourth place and 7%. Nationalist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan has also backed her. That is already an impressive 33% of the entire vote.
Source: BBC
