Centrist, far-right candidates advance

Associated Press

PARIS

Centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right populist Marine Le Pen advanced Sunday to a runoff in France’s presidential election, remaking the country’s political landscape and setting up a showdown over its participation in the European Union.

French politicians on the left and right immediately urged voters to block Le Pen’s path to power in the May 7 runoff, saying her virulently nationalist anti-EU and anti-immigration politics would spell disaster for France.

“Extremism can only bring unhappiness and division to France,” defeated conservative candidate Francois Fillon said. “As such, there is no other choice than to vote against the extreme right.”

In Paris, protesters angry at Le Pen’s advance – some from anarchist and anti-fascist groups – scuffled with police. Officers fired tear gas to disperse the rowdy crowd. Two people were injured, and police detained three people as demonstrators burned cars, danced around bonfires and dodged riot police. At a peaceful protest by about 300 people at the Place de la Republique some sang “No Marine and no Macron!” and “Now burn your voting cards.”

The selection of Le Pen and Macron presented voters with the starkest possible choice between two diametrically opposed visions of the EU’s future and France’s place in it. It set up a battle between Macron’s optimistic vision of a tolerant France and a united Europe with open borders against Le Pen’s darker, inward-looking “French-first” platform that called for closed borders, tougher security, less immigration and dropping the shared euro currency to return to the French franc.

With Le Pen wanting France to leave the EU and Macron wanting even closer cooperation between the bloc’s 28 nations, Sunday’s outcome meant the May 7 runoff will have undertones of a referendum on France’s EU membership.

The absence in the runoff of candidates from either the mainstream left Socialists or the right-wing Republicans party – the two main political groups that have governed post-war France – also marked a seismic shift in French politics.

Macron, a 39-year-old investment banker, made the runoff on the back of a grass-roots campaign without the support of a major political party.

With 90 percent of votes counted, the Interior Ministry said Macron had nearly 24 percent, giving him a slight cushion over Le Pen’s 22 percent. Fillon, with just under 20 percent, was slightly ahead of the far-left’s Jean-Luc Melenchon, who had 19 percent.

Macron supporters at his Paris election-day headquarters went wild as polling agency projections showed the ex-finance minister making the runoff, cheering, singing “La Marseillaise” anthem, waving French tricolor and European flags and shouting “Macron, president!”

In a brief televised message, Socialist Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve urged voters to back Macron to defeat the National Front’s “funereal project of regression for France and of division of the French.”