Macron and Le Pen will compete in the second round on April 24.According to the exit polls in France, the winner of the first round of the presidential election was President Emmanuel Macron. According to the first unofficial results, Macron, the candidate of the March of the Republic (En Marche), received 28.8 percent of the vote. Macron’s strongest opponent, the right-wing populist National Unity Party (RN) leader Marine Le Pen, had 23.3 percent of the vote. With none of the candidates reaching the absolute majority of 50 percent, Macron and Le Pen, the two candidates with the highest number of votes in the first round, will run for president in the second round on April 24.
About 49 million voters were called to the polls to vote in the elections. According to the data of the Ministry of Interior, the rate of participation in the elections fell behind the level in 2017 and realized as 65 percent. In the elections in 2017, the turnout rate was 69.4 percent.
In France, 12 candidates had the right to officially compete in the elections. Emmanuel Macron (liberal), Marine Le Pen (nationalist), Valérie Pécresse (conservative), Jean-Luc Mélenchon (radical left), Eric Zemmour (nationalist), Yannick Jadot (environmentalist), Fabien Roussel (communist), Anne Hidalgo (socialist) democrat), Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (conservative/nationalist), Jean Lassalle (ruralist), Philippe Poutou (trotskyist), Nathalie Artaud (trotskyist) ran for president.
In France, the president has been directly elected by the people since the constitutional amendment on 6 November 1962. General Charles de Gaulle, who was the symbol of the French resistance against the Nazis during the Second World War, became the first president to be elected with this system in 1965.