Independent centrist Macron estimated to have taken 23.7% of vote with National Front leader Le Pen on 21.7%; official results to follow Photograph: Vincent Isore/IP3/Getty Images
Independent centrist Macron estimated to have taken 23.7% of vote with National Front leader Le Pen on 21.7%; official results to follow Photograph: Vincent Isore/IP3/Getty Images
There remains just one department to be counted and its results won’t change the overall picture. Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen won the first round of voting and will head into a run off second round on 7 May.
Just as we are closing Reuters is reporting the final figures: Macron has 23.75% of votes and Le Pen has 21.53%, while Fillon has 19.91% and Melenchon has 19.64% according to the interior ministry.
Still no final result but we are down to the very last results. Have a look at our results tracker which shows that 105 of 107 departments have been counted.
While we wait for the final result it is probably worth revisiting an Associated Press interview with Donald Tump published over the weekend in which he is asked about his intervention in the French elections.
As you will see he is pressed on whether he supports Marine Le Pen. Eventually he says he does not endorse her...
AP: This morning you tweeted that after the possible terrorist attack in Paris, that it will have a big effect on the upcoming French election. What did you mean by that?
TRUMP: Well, I think it will have a big effect on who people are going to vote for in the election.
AP: Do you think it’s going to help Marine Le Pen?
TRUMP: I think so.
AP: Do you believe that she should be the president?
TRUMP: No, I have no comment on that, but I think that it’ll probably help her because she is the strongest on borders and she is the strongest on what’s been going on in France.
AP: Do you worry at all that by saying that, that a terrorist attack would have an impact on a democratic election, that it would actually embolden terrorists to try to —.
TRUMP: No. Look, everybody is making predictions who is going to win. I am no different than you, you could say the same thing. ...
AP: I just wonder if you are encouraging, you are the president of the United States, so to say that you worry that it encourages terrorists ...
TRUMP: No, I am no different than — no, I think it discourages terrorists, I think it discourages. I think what we’ve done on the border discourages it. I think that my stance on having people come in to this country that we have no idea who they are and in certain cases you will have radical Islamic terrorism. I’m not going to have it in this country. I’m not going to let what happened to France and other places happen here. And it’s already largely, you know — we have tens — we have hundreds of thousands of people that have been allowed into our country that should not be here. They shouldn’t be here. We have people allowed into our country with no documentation whatsoever. They have no documentation and they were allowed under the previous administrations, they were allowed into our country. It’s a big mistake.
AP: Just so that I am clear. You are not endorsing her for the office, but you are —
TRUMP: I am not endorsing her and I didn’t mention her name.
AP: Right, I just wanted to make sure I have that clear.
TRUMP: I believe whoever is the toughest on radical Islamic terrorism and whoever is the toughest at the borders will do well at the election. I am not saying that person is going to win, she is not even favored to win, you know. Right now, she is in second place.
The two candidates – the first pro-European and internationalist, the other anti-EU and protectionist – will now face off in a second round run off on 7 May. Polls have consistently forecast Macron will beat Le Pen and become France’s next president.
The first round result is an epochal political upheaval for France. For the first time in the nearly 60-year history of the Fifth Republic, neither of the candidates of the established parties of left and right will be in the run off.
Either we continue on the path to complete deregulation, or you choose France. You now have the chance to choose real change. This is what I propose: real change. It is time to liberate the French nation from arrogant elites who want to dictate how it must behave. Because yes, I am the candidate of the people.
Macron said that in the space of a year, since founding his En Marche! movement, it had “changed the face of French politics” and asked for a big victory for a large governing majority:
I want to construct a majority to govern and to transform, of new talents, in which all will have their place. I will not ask where they come from, but whether they agree with the renewal of our politics, the security of the French people, reforming society and relaunching the European project.
You are the face of this renewal. My fellow citizens, there is not more than one France. There is only one, ours, the France of patriots, in a Europe that protects and that we must reform. The task is immense, but I am ready, at your sides. Vive la République, vive la France.
We are still awaiting the final interior ministry result and will bring that to you as soon as it is released.
For a deeper look at what drives Macron personally and politically it is worth revisiting this profile written by the Guardian’s Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis.
After once likening his rebellious streak to France’s 15th-century saint and saviour Joan of Arc, Macron’s premise is to side-step the old party machines and build a direct relationship with the French people. He believes that ever since King Louis XVI’s head was chopped off in the revolution, France has been trying to compensate for the lack of a true leader figure who could personify France. The postwar president General de Gaulle fitted the bill, he has argued, but since then, the increasingly “ordinary” characters who served as president have left a kind of “empty seat at the heart of political life”.
Geert Wilders, Dutch MP and leader of the anti-Islam anti-immigrant Freedom Party, swung behind Le Pen, welcoming the result as a “bright day for patriots in France and elsewhere who want more national sovereignty and less EU and immigration.
“I have just sent her my sincere congratulations. Now on the way to a vigorous second round, I am hoping for a President Le Pen.”
Former British chancellor George Osborne, who is now editor of the Evening Standard newspaper, has joined in the chorus of politicians congratulating Macron and former Labour leader Ed Miliband couldn’t resist a bit of a troll …
Do not panic too much about this tweet. I guess @EmmunelMacron has many friends. I also met him once... https://t.co/OzLb0q4r4m
AFP has a good wrap of international reaction to the results:
Media in several countries pointed to the historic defeat suffered by the mainstream left and right, with the Wall Street Journal calling the vote a “stunning rebuke of France’s mainstream political forces”.
In an article headlined “France torn apart”, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted that more than 40% had cast their ballots for the far-right or far-left.
“Macron’s victory is so narrow that in the two previous presidential elections, he wouldn’t have won a place in the second round,” it said, warning against assumptions the centrist would win in May.
Switzerland’s Le Temps said the result signalled that the French republic was “broken” and that voters wanted “deep changes”.
The second round, it said, is “set to oppose two visions of France - one inclusive and open to the world and its concerns, and the other cut off behind its borders and its old myths”.
The stakes are high, it said: “The final choice of the French will change their country, but also the face of the world.”
The New York Times noted Macron’s strange status as both someone who has set himself apart from establishment parties and someone who hails from the political elite.
“His profile is that of an insider, but his policies are those of an outsider,” the Times said. “If the ever-precocious Mr. Macron is to succeed, his first challenge is to sell a product still largely unfamiliar to almost everyone: himself.”
The results in France have made the front pages of newspapers in the UK, with the Daily Mail hailing a New French revolution and The Times claiming the French elite have been “humiliated as outsiders sweep to victory”. The Guardian looks ahead to the run-off vote on 7 May, saying the result redraws the French political divide.
Bonnie Malkin here taking over from Jon Henley for the time being.
Sonia Delesalle-Stolper, the UK and Ireland correspondent for the French daily Libération, writes in the Guardian tonight that the much anticipated domino effect following the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election has not, so far, materialised and the relief in France is immense.
“This result is a relief but it also represents a shock – not because of Marine Le Pen’s presence in the second round, which the polls prepared us for. But because the next president will come from neither of the two traditional main parties, the conservatives and socialists, the first time since the beginning of the fifth Republic, founded in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle.”
Here is the actual state of the count from a few minutes ago – very close to the polling institutes’ vote estimations published when polling stations closed more than three hours ago. And pretty close to their opinion polls over the past few weeks, too. Whisper it quietly, but French pollsters may know their job ...
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