Liberation: Macron's re-election is an honorable victory

The French newspaper (Liberation) said that the outgoing President Emmanuel Macron won a dishonorable victory, when he was re-elected with 58.8% of the vote after a campaign he did not participate in its first round, and in its second round he took advantage of the Republican Front to block the path of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. which received 41.2% of the vote.

In a joint report by journalists Jean-Baptiste Daula and Laure Ekie, the newspaper explained that Macron, who was 39 years younger than he entered the Elysee Palace, scored a new record with his victory today under the Fifth Republic, as the first president to be re-elected by universal suffrage without passing a period Live with the opposition.

And now - as the two writers see - the president can breathe a sigh of relief, but without declaring a resounding victory, despite the "dancing" steps that his ministers drew at the time of the results announcement at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, to admit in a faint statement that he realized that "this vote is binding on me for years to come." .

The report pointed out that the neutrality, which has reached a level unparalleled since 1969, with a rate of 28.2%, should be a cause for humility and an indication of the extent to which this duplicate version of the 2017 elections aroused the French discontent, and also reflects the reluctance of voters to the polls in the second round more than The first, as was the case 5 years ago, when participation recorded a decrease of nearly two points, meaning that about 3.2 million voters announced their rejection through a blank or invalid ballot paper.

The authors find that it is also difficult to express the joy at the end of a campaign in which the difference between the far-right candidate and the outgoing president was not significant in several opinion polls, which panicked Macron's party before the first round, as it seemed that the victory of the right-wing candidate - which was an out of the question in general. 2017- It became expected after the 2016 Brexit referendum, and Donald Trump's victory in the United States a few months later.

Transformation

The report indicates that the last two weeks before polling day witnessed a shift in the situation in favor of Macron, who widened the gap between him and his rival, but Macron, who beat Le Pen by more than 30 points in 2017, won on Sunday by only 17 points.

The victory would have been considered a remarkable victory if the National Rally, heir to the National Front, had not achieved the best result in its history, an outcome that looked like a "resounding victory" when Le Pen welcomed seeing her camp's ideas "reach the heights".

He also notes that after emphasizing that "there is no longer a republican front", Macron could thank the left-wing voters who overwhelmingly supported Jean-Luc Melenchon's candidacy and carried him in the first round to third place, because they were the ones who held the keys to victory in the second round.

They returned to the polls in the second round of elections despite the bitterness, which beat Macron's fortunes.

Since the traditional Republican front is against the far right, Le Pen found no one to rely on in the second round except for Eric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont, as the Liberal Democratic Party candidate Valerie Pecres, the Green candidate Yannick Gaddo, the communist Fabian Roussel and the socialist Anne Hidalgo openly called for a vote for Macron, in When Melenchon merely called his voters to vote without "giving any vote to Le Pen," according to the newspaper.

The report concluded that Macron took to the field the day after the results of the first round of elections were announced, and the adoption of the right-wing rhetoric during the five years he spent in the presidency did not prevent him from looking to get the votes of the left when needed, by obtaining part of the votes of Melenchon supporters.

In his election speech, Macron focused on "environmental planning" and traveled to the four corners of France that largely voted for the leftist candidate, promising to make concessions on his goal of raising the legal retirement age to 65.