Sighs of relief could be heard from Paris to Brussels and all the way to Washington as French President Emmanuel Macron was re-elected to a fifth five-year term in the Elysée Palace. Though polls narrowed in the run-up to Sunday’s runoff, Macron eventually defeated far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen in the presidential elections—a contest that threatened to splinter the Western alliance against Russia and jeopardize the European Union’s very survival.
According to preliminary results released at 8 p.m. local time after polls closed, Macron defeated Le Pen with 58.2 percent of the vote to her 41.8 percent. Back then, the 39-year-old Macron came into power as an outsider, with a 32-point lead over Le Pen, on the promise of modernizing what he called a sclerotic, over-regulated country.
In the last five years, he has simplified French labor laws, making it easier for businesses to hire and fire employees, and he has abolished the wealth tax. However, he was forced to abandon a fuel tax increase after the plan sparked the so-called “yellow vest” movement, with explosive protests rocking the country for months in 2018 and 2019. Then there was COVID-19 in 2020, with nationwide lockdowns, in a pandemic that has killed 142,000 people in France so far. As that faded, the Ukraine conflict erupted, thrusting Macron into the role of the EU’s primary conduit to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Despite this, Macron, 44, is the first French president to be re-elected in 20 years—since 2002, when then-president Jacques Chirac defeated Le Pen’s rabidly anti-immigrant father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who faced a wall of opposition that blocked his path to power.
