France has a new president named Emmanuel Macron! The country erupted in celebration after the he was announced as the projected winner over extreme right-wing opponent Marine Le Pen in videos and tweets that you have to see!

Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron, 39, has become the youngest and newest president of France and the country is in the midst of a major celebration on Sunday, May 7. He beat out Marine Le Pen, 48, in an election that was watched around the world. Emmanuel took 65.5% of the vote and the extremist right-wing politician won over 34.5%. The crowds gathered and absolutely erupted when Emmanuel was revealed as the next president as they ferociously waved their French flags.

Emmanuel Macron: See Photos Of France’s New President

This election came two weeks after the initial election on April 23. Emmanuel was pegged as the favorite to win in the round after he won 8,5000 votes (24%) by the first round on Apr. 23. He surprisingly has never held political office before he served was a part of President Francis Hollande‘s staff as deputy secretary-general of the Élysée. Marine took only 7,6000 votes (21.30%) in the round one. She was considered a controversial candidate because of her anti-immigration policies. Marine also discussed the possibility of France leaving the European Union, which could have led to the end of the organization. People also worried that she be anti-Semitic policies similar to her extremist right-wing policies like her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, 88.

President Donald Trump, 70, congratulated Emmanuel on his victory. “Congratulations to Emmanuel Macron on his big win today as the next President of France. I look very much forward to working with him!” he wrote. Hillary Clinton, 69, also shared her thoughts on the news and said, “Victory for Macron, for France, the EU, & the world. Defeat to those interfering w/democracy. (But the media says I can’t talk about that).” People were super excited and took to Twitter to share the news. “MACRON WINS!!! *exhales*” one user wrote. “Congratulations France! A truly great nation faces the world confidently and doesn’t hide behind walls,” another tweet read. One thrilled French citizen shared a powerful video of the cheering crowds and wrote, “France has rejected hatred and chosen love instead. Vive la France, Macron.”

HollywoodLifers, were you surprised by the election results? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!</s>Marine Le Pen will take on Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the French presidential election on May 7th. Here voters tell us why she is the best candidate.

Marine Le Pen has lambasted by her rivals, criticised by leading economists and business leaders, declared public enemy number one by most politicians outside her party and had war declared on her by sextremists Femen.

Yet in the first round of the French presidential election she gained 21.3 percent of the vote.

We asked some of those voters who attended her raucous rally in Paris to tell us why, in just one sentence or two.

"She will change something. We need to give her a chance. She can’t do anything catastrophic. If she doesn’t succeed then we will try someone else," said Francois Glauzy, a chauffeur from the Paris suburb of Bagneux.

"I want her to give a chance to French people above the others and give work to people who need it," said Rosaline Glauzy, also from the Paris suburb of Bagneux.

Grandfather Denis Thierry, a former member of the Communist party from Paris told The Local there must be "national priority" for the French.

"I have grandchildren. They are all on the list for social housing but not one of them has been given lodging. They need to prioritize lodging and jobs for French people."

Student Roxanne Boissel said: "I know a lot of students who don’t have work because those jobs are going to immigrants. France has homeless living in the streets but immigrants are given housing.

"We need to control our borders and our country. France is nothing like it was 20 years ago," said Florence Gerault a teacher from Versailles.

"I will vote Marine Le Pen to stop the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in France more than anything else because it’s a real problem for the country and for all of Europe," said Gregory a civil servant from near Paris. "All those who are considered a danger should be expelled from France."

Martine a civil servant who is originally from Guadeloupe said: "I want to feel safe when I leave my house in the morning. Criminals are not punished in this country. If she doesn’t win, I won’t stay in France. I don’t feel safe."

"I’m voting for Le Pen for a return to national sovereignty and a return of power to French people so we are dictated to by Brussels. I want a return to a Europe of nations," said Valentin Manent, aged 28 a stage technician from the city of Orleans.

"In the current economic context immigration is just not sustainable. It causes difficulties in terms of security and needs to be controlled," said 27-year-old Bruno.

"I’ll vote her for social justice. Our elderly people and our handicapped need to be looked after before immigrants are looked after," said 38-year old Jeanne Berullier from Orleans.

Antonio Davisseau, a young student from Toulon in the south of France added: "We have millions of unemployed and homeless people and the government does nothing for these people yet they welcome all the immigrants. Marine Le Pen is the only one who will change things radically."

Kevin, a 25-year-old from Nancy who works in marketing spoke of the immigrant communities in poor housing estates.

"We can’t accept more immigrants, when we can’t assimilate those that are already here," he said. "They live in their own communities and it just encourages integralism."

Veronica Radoux, from suburbs of Paris said: "France cannot take on all the misery in the world. At some point we have to say ‘stop’. Marine Le Pen can change things. She is willing.

Alexandre a 20-year-old student said: "Most of the criminals we have are immigrants and they don't want to be French. They want to keep their own identity."

"Voting for Le Pen is about getting the forgotten France back again," said Quentin a 29-year-old political advisor for the National Front.

"There is a big divide between the big cities in France and the rest of the country. The small places on the outskirts are all having their banks and shops closed down. Some cities and villages are dying. I'm defending these territories. We all are."

Cyril, an engineer from Paris, said: "There is so much immigration that we are losing our identity. Our principle value is respect and there’s none left."

Elisabeth Lalanne de Haut, a National Front regional councillor from Haute Normandie, said: "There’s only Marine Le Pen who can restore French values and our customs, traditions and our homeland, because certain other candidates don’t like France."

A 60-year-old retired man from Toulouse who gave his name as Jean-Pierre said: "Before, I used to speak to anyone, but I don’t want to speak to people wearing the veil. What would I say to her? I Just want things to be balanced. We are turning into Lebanon."

Valentin Caceres, a 20-year-old student from the greater Paris region of Ile-de-France said: Each country is different. When I go to Morocco or the United States I like to discover new cultures and I want France to keep its own culture. We have the impression that France is no longer France."

"She is the only one who is a patriot and the only one who will defend French values of liberty, egality and fraternity. These are the values of our civilisation of our story, but we are losing them," said retired 61-year-old Christian de la Motte from Paris.

"Africans who come to France come with their own traditions and their own culture and little by little they impose their culture and traditions," he added. "I don’t want to eat halal meat or have people praying in the streets and we don’t want to see women wearing the veil in the streets."

"Marine Le Pen is the only one who defend our monetary sovereignty. In this economic crisis France needs to be able to devalue its own currency to boost exports," said 25-year-old Alexis Robert from the Champagne region of eastern France.

"There’s not just one reason to vote for Marine Le Pen, there are many. Everything is linked. Migration, security, the economy. We need to control our borders not close them like 95 percent of all the other countries in the world.

"They have made a waste of this country. When you think of those people who fought for the country in two wars. If they could see the France of today…"</s>Late Sunday afternoon, the latest 2017 French elections polls will close and results will reveal whether centrist Onwards! candidate Emmanuel Macron or far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen will be the next president of France.

If pre-election polls are to be believed, Emmanuel will have no difficulty vanquishing Marine in Sunday’s election. In every poll released during the month of May, Macron beat Le Pen by a commanding margin of at least 20 percent of the total vote, usually coming out even further ahead of her. These numbers include one large Ipsos/CEVIPOF/LeMonde poll with 5,331 respondents conducted on Friday, where the centrist candidate actually took 63 percent of the vote to his far-right competitor’s 37 percent, a sizable 26 percentage point margin of victory.

The campaign has been one of the most tumultuous in French history, with neither the ruling Socialist Party or its traditional opposition, the Republicans, making it to the run-off. In the first round of voting, the Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon was not even able to achieve 7 percent of the results, coming in well behind the four frontrunners — including far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, with whom he had unsuccessfully attempted to form a coalition earlier in the election.

First-round polls preceding the vote were relatively similar to the final French election results. All of them correctly predicted that Macron and Le Pen would prevail, with Republican François Fillon and Mélenchon coming in narrowly behind them. Emmanuel’s final voting tally reflected his average in the polls, 24 percent, while Marine came in more than a full point behind her average in the pre-vote polls.

This detail is significant because of concerns that, like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, right-wing populism will have a stronger showing in the final results of the French election than polls predict. Yet with only two weeks between the first round of the French presidential elections and the run-off on Sunday, it seems less likely that these numbers will shift — especially considering the fact that it was Le Pen and not Macron that did not reach poll expectations in the first round.

However, just over 48 hours ahead of the election, a trove of emails from Emmanuel’s campaign were released the public. Bound by law, French media are on a gag order about reporting about their contents, which also limits Macron’s ability to respond to them. On Twitter, #MacronLeaks trends while thousands of French voters dig through the batch, though as of yet nothing has been officially confirmed or investigated.

No matter what the emails contain, the two candidates stand at such sharply different ends of the spectrum of French politics that it’s difficult to imagine the leak having a decisive influence on the outcome of the election. Still, it does lead to uncertainty about who will show up at the polls, and, as no polling will have been carried out following the surprise release, the election results will be the first measure of their impact.

Marine hasn’t shied away from comparisons to Donald Trump during the French presidential campaign. She has, in fact, openly praised him, and even decided to stop at Trump Tower for coffee during a visit to New York City. Like the American president, Le Pen has been called Islamophobic by the press for a hard line on immigration. She was taken to court for inciting racial hatred when she compared Muslim immigration to the Nazi occupation of France, reported BBC News.

Also, like her North American counterpart, she favors economic protectionism, similarly waging war on globalism in her speeches. One of her key bases of support are rural French, much like the districts which carried Trump to victory. While refusing to give an endorsement, the U.S. president did recently say that she was the “strongest candidate” in the presidential race.

Unlike Trump, Marine is not running for president in a country with an electoral college system. While she maintained the top level of support for most of the first-round campaign, many French citizens would sooner not vote than for Ms. Le Pen.

She also strongly differs from Trump in political experience. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been in politics for decades, making it to the second round of France’s presidential elections in 2002 — where he lost by the widest margin in the country’s history to Jacques Chirac.

The presidential candidate leading the polls has also been compared to a U.S. president: Barack Obama. Likewise, he has also welcomed the association. Emmanuel shared a snippet of his call with the former American president on social media last month. Others have compared him with Hillary Clinton, sometimes unfavorably, in the context of his more centrist approach to politics.

If the Russian government is trying to shake up the established order, Macron would be their biggest roadblock. He’s the only candidate who is considered antagonistic to Russia, and he’s also spoken out the most about remaining in NATO and the European Union. One article from Sputnik quoted a source linking him to the “wealthy gay lobby,” a insinuating rumor that followed him throughout his candidacy.

Check back to this article to see if the 2017 French elections polls correctly called a victory in the final results for Emmanuel Macron and a failure for Marine Le Pen.</s>Less than two days before the high stakes French presidential election Sunday, the campaign of Emmanuel Macron said it had been the target of a massive hack.

Wikileaks posted 9 gigabytes of Macron's campaign data, which is said to include both real and fake documents. Fingers are being pointed at Russia, though the Kremlin denies involvement.

The eyes of the world have been on the French election, in part because Macron is a political novice. He and his opponent, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, pushed out more established candidates in the first round of the election. Le Pen wants to pull France out of the European Union, a move that Vladimir Putin would applaud. She traveled to Moscow a few weeks ago and was photographed with Putin. As NPR's Eleanor Beardsley has reported, Le Pen has called the sanctions on Russia "silly" and has promised to lift them.

France has an official blackout period the day before an election, which is intended to give voters time to reflect. The media and the campaigns are forbidden from talking about the election at all beginning Friday night at midnight, and going until the polls close in the evening on Sunday, May 7. The massive data dump came just moments before that blackout began, giving Macron's campaign little time to respond.

Macron's political movement En Marche! (Onwards!) confirmed the hack in a statement: "The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and coordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information."

Nicolas Tenzer, a specialist in cyber attacks and disinformation, told Eleanor Beardsley, "It seems that all this hacking was directed on Macron by Russia's propaganda teams, and we all know that Wikileaks actively is working for Russia."

This isn't the first time Macron's campaign has said it was the target of hacks. When the centrist candidate began to emerge as a frontrunner, his campaign began reporting that they were being targeted by the Kremlin with disinformation and hacking campaigns. At the time, the French government warned Russia against meddling in their election.

According to Reuters, the French presidential election commission is investigating the most recent data dump, saying in a statement they would meet Saturday to discuss it. But thanks in part to the media blackout, many voters that NPR's Eleanor Beardsley spoke with Saturday said they hadn't heard about the leak.

Still, as Beardsley told NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, "You see the sort of conspiracy theories this could feed." Polls open at 8 o'clock Sunday morning, in the election that has garnered international attention for what it could mean for the EU and the role of Russia in geopolitics.</s>French independent centrist Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte are greeted by supporters after casting his vote in Le Touquet, France, Sunday, May 7, 2017. Macron will be France's next president, pollsters projected Sunday night.

PARIS — Ripping up France's political map, French voters elected independent centrist Emmanuel Macron as the country's youngest president Sunday, delivering a resounding victory to the unabashedly pro-European former investment banker and dashing the populist dream of far-right rival Marine Le Pen.

Macron, who had never run for office before, celebrated with thousands of jubilant, flag-waving supporters outside the Louvre Museum in Paris on Sunday night.

The European anthem "Ode to Joy" played as he strode out to address the swelling crowd.

"France has won!" he said. "Everyone said it was impossible. But they do not know France!"

Marine Le Pen, his far-right opponent in the runoff, quickly called the 39-year-old Macron to concede after voters rejected her "French-first" nationalism by a large margin. Le Pen's performance punctured her hopes that the populist wave which swept Donald Trump into the White House and led Britain to vote to leave the EU would also carry her to France's presidential Elysee Palace.

Macron told the Louvre crowd that the Le Pen vote was one of "anger, disarray."

"I will do everything in the five years to come so there is no more reason to vote for the extremes," he said.

Earlier, in a solemn televised victory speech, Macron vowed to heal the social divisions exposed by France's acrimonious election campaign.

"I know the divisions in our nation that led some to extreme votes. I respect them," he declared, unsmiling. "I know the anger, the anxiety, the doubts that a large number of you also expressed. It is my responsibility to hear them."

The result wasn't close: With about 90 percent of votes counted, Macron had 64 percent support. Le Pen had 36 percent — about double what Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father and co-founder of their National Front party, achieved at the same stage in the 2002 presidential election.

Macron's victory strengthens France's place as a central pillar of the European Union, and marked the third time in six months — following elections in Austria and the Netherlands — that European voters shot down far-right populists who wanted to restore borders across Europe. The election of a French president who champions European unity could also strengthen the EU's hand in its complex divorce proceedings with Britain.

Parisians lined the streets outside Macron's campaign headquarters to see his motorcade whisk him away to the Louvre party. His wife, Brigitte, joined him on stage after his address.

Macron said he understood that some voters backed him reluctantly, simply to keep out Le Pen and her National Front party, which has a long history of anti-Semitism and racism.

"I know that this is not a blank check," he said. "I know about our disagreements. I will respect them."

After the most closely watched and unpredictable French presidential campaign in recent memory, many voters rejected the runoff choices altogether — casting blank or spoiled ballots in record numbers Sunday. Police sprayed tear gas and detained dozens of protesters holding running demonstrations through eastern Paris after the election results came out.

Congratulatory messages poured in from abroad. Trump tweeted congratulations on what he called Macron's "big win" and said he looked forward to working with the new French leader. Macron has said he wants continued intelligence-sharing with the United States and cooperation at the United Nations and hopes to persuade Trump not to pull the U.S. out of a global accord fighting climate change.

Germany's foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, laced his welcome for Macron with a warning to the French, saying: "If he fails, in five years Mrs. Le Pen will be president and the European project will go to the dogs."

Macron becomes not only France's youngest-ever president but also one of its most unlikely. Until now, modern France had been governed either by the Socialists or the conservatives, but both of their candidates were eliminated before the runoff.

"France has sent an incredible message to itself, to Europe and the world," said Macron ally Francois Bayrou, tipped among his possible choices for prime minister.

Unknown to voters before his turbulent 2014-16 tenure as France's pro-business economy minister, Macron took a giant gamble by quitting Socialist President Francois Hollande's government to run as an independent. His startup political movement — optimistically named "En Marche! (In Motion)" — caught fire in just one year, harnessing voters' hunger for new faces and new ideas.

"I'm so happy, it feels so good! I lived the election of Donald Trump in New York, and now finally, after Brexit, after Trump, populism has been beaten in France," Macron supporter Pierre-Yves Colinet said at the Louvre party. "Today, I'm proud to be French."

Despite her loss, Le Pen's advancement to the presidential runoff for the first time marked a breakthrough for the 48-year-old and underscored a growing acceptance of her anti-immigration, France-first nationalism.

Le Pen immediately turned her focus to France's upcoming legislative election in June, where Macron will need a working majority to govern effectively. Le Pen said her "historic and massive" score turned her party into "the leading opposition force against the new president's plans."

"I call on all patriots to join us," Le Pen said. "France will need you more than ever in the months ahead."

Her supporters at a National Front election night gathering in Paris put on a brave face.

"Now we enter combat," said Didier Roxel, a National Front legislative candidate.

Le Pen said she won 11 million votes, which would be her party's highest-ever electoral score.

Macron and Le Pen offered polar-opposite visions: Le Pen's closed borders against Macron's open ones; his commitment to free trade ran against her proposals to protect the French from global economic competition and immigration. Her desire to free France from the EU and the shared euro currency contrasted with his argument that both are essential for the future of Europe's third-largest economy.

Macron also got lucky in the campaign. One of his most dangerous opponents, conservative former Prime Minister Francois Fillon, was vilified after allegations that his family benefited from cushy taxpayer-funded jobs for years. Fillon is facing charges in the case.

On the left, the Socialist Party imploded, its candidate abandoned by voters who wanted to punish Hollande, France's most unpopular president since World War II. Hollande himself decided not to run again.

Macron takes charge of a nation that, when Britain leaves the EU in 2019, will become the EU's only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

But the vote also showed that France's 67 million people are deeply divided, riven by anxieties about terrorism and chronic unemployment, worried about the cultural and economic impact of immigration and fearful of France's ability to compete against giants like China and Google.

Macron has promised a France that would stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin but that also would seek to work with Putin on fighting the Islamic State group, whose extremists have claimed multiple attacks in France since 2015.

France has been in a state of emergency since then and 50,000 security forces were out to safeguarded Sunday's vote.

Associated Press writers Angela Charlton, Samuel Petrequin, Lori Hinnant, Thomas Adamson, Philippe Sotto, Raphael Satter, Elaine Ganley, David Keyton and Nicolas Vaux-Montagny contributed to this report.</s>Paris: Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France on Sunday with a business-friendly vision of European integration, defeating Marine Le Pen, a far-right nationalist who threatened to take France out of the European Union, early projections showed.

The centrist's emphatic victory, which also smashed the dominance of France’s mainstream parties, will bring huge relief to European allies who had feared another populist upheaval to follow Britain's vote to quit the EU and Donald Trump's election as U.S. president.

The 39-year-old former investment banker, who served for two years as economy minister but has never previously held elected office, will now become France's youngest leader since Napoleon with a promise to transcend outdated left-right divisions.

Three projections, issued within minutes of polling stations closing at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT), showed Macron beating Le Pen by around 65 percent to 35 - a gap wider than the 20 or so percentage points that pre-election surveys had pointed to.

Even so, it was a record performance for the National Front, a party whose anti-immigrant policies until recently made it a pariah in French politics, and underlined the scale of the divisions that he must try to heal.

Le Pen's high-spending, anti-globalisation 'France-first' policies may have unnerved financial markets but they appealed to many poorer members of society against a background of high unemployment, social tensions and security concerns.

The 48-year-old's share of the vote was set to be almost twice that won by her father Jean-Marie, the last National Front candidate to qualify for a presidential runoff, who was trounced by Jacques Chirac in 2002.

Macron's immediate challenge will be to secure a majority in next month's parliamentary election for En Marche! (Onwards!), his political movement that is barely a year old, in order to implement his programme.

However, at least one opinion poll published in the run-up to the second round has indicated that this could be within reach.</s>BERLIN/PARIS (REUTERS) - After a decade of slow growth, rising unemployment and dwindling competitiveness, France elected a president on Sunday (May 7) who says he has a plan to pull the country out of its economic malaise.

Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker who quit the government of Francois Hollande twice out of frustration with the slow pace of reforms, is promising to overhaul the labour market, simplify the tax and pension systems, while paring back regulations he says hamper innovation.

But as he gets set to enter the Elysee Palace following his defeat of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, the 39-year-old former economy minister faces daunting obstacles. He will be trying to push through his reform agenda at a time when France is more divided than ever over how to respond to the disruptive forces of globalisation.

The election campaign showed that nearly half the country would prefer a dirigiste approach to the economy in which the role of the French state is expanded rather than shrunk, as Macron proposes.

In order to have a chance to implement his plans he will have to secure parliamentary backing. That will depend on how his uproven new party, En Marche! (Onwards!), does in legislative elections next month.

And even if he does get the majority he needs, it is likely that many of his reforms could take months, or even years, to produce results.

Delays could expose Macron and his government to the same political backlash that ultimately pushed Gerhard Schroeder, the chancellor responsible for Germany's "Agenda 2010" reform drive, out of office a dozen years ago.

"Macron is promising an incremental approach whose success will depend on negotiations with the unions," said Gilles Moec, chief European economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "I understand the strategy, but it is not one that will deliver immediate results. It will take time to bed down."

Macron's economic programme, put together by Jean-Pisani Ferry, the former head of Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, eschews the "shock-and-awe" approach of his defeated centre-right rival Francois Fillon, which included radical public sector job cuts and an extension of the statutory working week.

Instead he is charting a more nuanced course that his advisers say is better suited to addressing the root causes of France's economic troubles. Many independent economists agree.

Macron will not scrap the controversial 35-hour workweek, as Fillon promised. Instead he plans to get around it by allowing firms to negotiate in-house deals with their employees on working hours and pay. He has signalled that he could fast-track his labour reforms through parliament via executive order.

On pensions, Macron has no plans to hike the official retirement age of 62. Instead he wants to unify France's confusing web of pension plans over time by moving to a Swedish-style points system in which payouts are tied to contributions people pay in during their working lives.

Macron's approach to reducing the size of the French state is also measured. He wants to save 60 billion euros over five years compared to 100 billion in Fillon's plan. A cut in corporate tax rates to 25 percent from 33 percent would be phased in gradually.

Sylvie Goulard, a member of the European parliament who has advised Macron during the campaign, likens the approach to someone who does half an hour of sports every day. "It may not seem like a lot, but if you are disciplined about it, if you do it right, then it pays off. And it's better for you than running a marathon," she said.

Macron's gradual approach could reduce the risk that politically dangerous street protests - the scourge of many a French president - will end up undermining his agenda.

But it has also left him vulnerable to criticism from conservatives who believe the French economy needs a far bolder reform jolt after what many view as a lost decade.

Hollande spent his first two years in office satisfying old-school socialists in his party with symbolic steps like a wealth tax, before shifting belatedly to a business-friendly reform agenda overseen by Macron and ex-prime minister Manuel Valls.

Hollande's predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy managed to raise the retirement age, but did little else before becoming engulfed in the global financial crisis and euro zone turmoil. Before that, crippling street protests in the mid-90s forced Jacques Chirac to abandon his reform plans.

The stakes for Macron are much higher. If he fails with an agenda that urges the French to embrace globalisation and the European Union, he could struggle to see off the challenge from Le Pen's National Front five years from now.

A survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation last week showed how divided the French electorate is. Some 20 percent of French voters identify with the extreme right or left, compared to 7 percent in the European Union as a whole. Just 36 percent see themselves as "centrist", versus 62 percent in the EU.

Without quick results on the economy, Macron could also struggle to deliver on another of his big promises: convincing Germany to agree to a "grand bargain" for Europe involving closer integration of the euro zone.

Working in his favour, however, are two developments.

One, the French economy is already improving, with consumer sentiment at its highest level in a decade and business confidence near a six-year peak. Though France's unemployment rate remains high, at close to 10 per cent, the economy has been creating jobs at its fastest pace in nearly a decade.

"France is already on the right track," said Holger Schmieding of Berenberg Bank, noting that steps taken in the past two years have vaulted it to the top of the OECD's structural reform rankings.

Another positive development is a shift in the French trade union landscape that could make it easier for Macron to deliver reforms of the labour market. Earlier this year, the moderate CFDT overtook the militant CGT as the strongest union in the private sector.

"For the first time there is a possibility of a reformist majority within the French unions," said Moec of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "It could make negotiations more efficient. It is absolutely central."</s>Ms George Pau-Langevin, a parliamentarian and former junior education minister, is out on the stump, meeting voters on Rue des Pyrenees, a long road that runs from south-east to north-east Paris.

Ms Pau-Langevin is not campaigning for her preferred candidate in today's French presidential election; in fact, she is not even campaigning for her own party, but she says it is important to get out and vote nonetheless.

"I am a Socialist but I hope we will see people come together and vote for Macron," she said.

France is voting in the final round of an election that has deeply divided the nation. Voters face a stark choice: centrist Emmanuel Macron or far-right leader Marine Le Pen; and the outcome could affect France's place in Europe, the shape of its economy and policies on immigration.

Ms Le Pen sees herself as the candidate of national unity, though many in France see her as a divisive figure for her anti-Europe and anti-immigration stance.
• THE TWO CANDIDATES' STARKLY DIFFERENT VISIONS FOR FRANCE
• Wants to make France more attractive to skilled immigrants by shortening the visa process, and to promote "talent" visas as well as help immigrants become more fluent in French. Wants closer integration with the European Union on fiscal, trade and social legislation, and has called for a dedicated euro zone budget. Wants to keep France open to globalisation, although he plans to fight "social dumping", in which companies move jobs to EU member countries where labour is cheaper. Plans to jump-start growth with a business-friendly labour and tax overhaul that would make it easier for firms to hire and fire workers. Wants to restore national border controls and pull France from Schengen, an agreement that allows citizens of European countries to move freely among signatory nations. Wants to cap immigration to 10,000 people a year, and refugees can apply for asylum only from outside France. Plans to hold a national referendum on taking France out of the EU. Also wants France to abandon the euro and bring back a national currency. Calls for "intelligent protectionism" and backs nationalistic economic policies, such as favouring French businesses for public contracts. Wants to cut taxes for small businesses and put a 35 per cent tax on products made by French companies abroad, while raising taxes on foreign workers to try to ensure "priority hiring of French people".

Mr Macron, who leads the newly founded En Marche! (On the Move!) movement, has increased his lead, according to polls.

Ifop-Fiducial gives him 63 per cent to Ms Le Pen's 37 per cent.

Ms Le Pen is far from conceding, though. "My goal is to win this presidential election," she told RTL radio.

Her rise has been so thoroughshe may be justified in claiming victory even in defeat.

As it stands, France is a nation deeply split, with the country's east voting for Ms Le Pen in the first round of the election, while the west and capital went to Mr Macron.

This, in itself, is something of a revolution, with Ms Le Pen's National Front no longer confined to its heartlands in the south, having successfully wooed voters in France's northern "rust belt" of declining industrial towns with an anti-globalisation message which was previously the preserve of France's political left.

Researcher Antoine Jardin at Paris' Sciences Po university said that while a Le Pen victory is now unlikely, her rise from the fringes should not be understated.

"Marine Le Pen is still very high, polling around 35 per cent, even low 40s, right now. It's a 200 per cent increase in her vote over the last five years," he said.

"We are in a weird situation where her getting 38 per cent of the vote is a defeat."

She has also reached beyond the traditional National Front voter base by attracting the young - 40 per cent of National Front's nationwide support comes from voters aged between 18 and 24, attracted by her "anti-system" message.

Others are surprisingly positive, too. According to an unofficial poll conducted by dating app Hornet, despite her vow to abolish same-sex marriage, one in three gay voters will vote for the far-right candidate, driven largely by concerns about Islamist extremism.

Ms Le Pen has also courted Jewish voters, hoping to undo her party's reputation for anti-Semitism.

Ms Pau-Langevin hopes that voter abstention will not be an issue and wants her party to work with Mr Macron if he wins.

"This is a very strange election. I think the Socialist party must give a chance to Macron to have a programme," she said.

Ms Le Pen lost more ground after a bruising televised debate last Wednesday. Polls suggested about two-thirds of viewers felt Mr Macron's performance was the better of the two. Still, she has a large support base.

Her status has been buoyed in recent years following concern about France's stagnant economy and a spate of Islamist terrorist attacks.

However, political scientist Olivier Roy says the impact of terrorism has faded.

"The big attacks were Paris and Nice. The last attack, two weeks ago, was an incident. It made a big fuss in the media, but among the population, not so much," he said.

Mr Roy says that Ms Le Pen's campaigning has gone as far as it can go. "The elections are not about terrorism; it's one issue among others. The main issues are Europe, the economy and so on. Macron understands that very well, while Marine Le Pen doesn't," he told The Sunday Times.

Whatever the result, change is coming to a France whose identity has been battered by the modern world, and if Mr Macron defeats the insurgent Ms Le Pen he will do so only by having bypassed France's exhausted political elite, of which he is a former member.

Mr Gael Forlot, who is from Brittany in north-eastern France but has lived in Ireland for 20 years, watched the televised debate, but says it was almost unbearable.

"I tried to watch the debate, but she is like a contagious disease; her anger is contagious. She's a dangerous woman," he said, referring to Ms Le Pen.

Despite Mr Macron pitching himself as the candidate of hope, Mr Forlot echoed the sentiments of many: They will vote for Mr Macron, but only in order to stop Ms Le Pen.

"In the next round I will vote; I have to vote anti-National Front."</s>PARIS — French voters decided Sunday whether to back pro-business independent Emmanuel Macron or far-right populist Marine Le Pen as their next president, casting ballots in an unusually tense and important presidential election that also could decide Europe’s future.

With Macron the pollsters’ favourite, voting stations opened across mainland France at 8 a.m. (0600 GMT) under the watch of 50,000 security forces guarding against extremist attacks. A security scare caused by a suspicious bag prompted the brief evacuation of the Louvre museum courtyard where Macron plans to celebrate election night.

France’s Interior Ministry said voter turnout at midday was running slightly lower than during the last presidential runoff in 2012. The ministry said 28% of eligible voters had cast ballots, compared with a half-day tally of 31% five years ago.

Commentators think a low turnout would benefit Le Pen, whose supporters are seen as more committed and therefore more likely to show up to vote.

Macron voted in the seaside resort of Le Touquet in northern France alongside his wife, Brigitte Macron. Le Pen cast her ballot just a hundred kilometres away in Henin-Beaumont, a small town controlled by her National Front party.

Macron, 39, a former Socialist economy minister and one-time banker who ran as an independent, was all smiles and petted a black dog as he stepped out of his vacation home. For security reasons, he was driven to his polling station nearby.

Le Pen, 48, was able to vote without any incident after feminist activists were briefly detained a couple of hours earlier Sunday for hanging a big anti-Le Pen banner from a church in the northern town.

Meanwhile, police and soldiers worked to secure the symbolic Paris venues where the next president will celebrate victory.

The grand internal courtyard of the renowned palace-turned-museum Macron picked for his celebration party reopened after several hundred journalists preparing for the election event had to leave because of the security alert over the suspicious bag.

The museum itself was not evacuated, and tourists continued entering and leaving the site. The Louvre already was being heavily guarded after an extremist attacker targeted soldiers near the museum during the presidential campaign. Paris police said the evacuation was a “precautionary measure.”

If Le Pen wins, she plans to celebrate at the Chalet du Lac in the Bois de Vincennes, a vast park on Paris’ eastern edge.

The most closely watched and unpredictable French presidential campaign in recent memory ended with a hacking attack and document leak targeting Macron on Friday night. France’s government cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, is investigating the hack, which Macron’s team says was aimed at destabilizing the vote.

France’s election campaign commission said Saturday that “a significant amount of data” — and some fake information — was leaked on social networks following the hacking attack on Macron. The leaked documents appeared largely mundane, and the perpetrators remain unknown.

The fate of the European Union may hang in the balance as France’s 47 million voters decide whether to risk handing the presidency to Le Pen, who dreams of quitting the bloc and its common currency, or to play it safer with Macron, an unabashed pro-European who wants to strengthen the EU.

Global financial markets and France’s neighbours are watching carefully. A “Frexit” would be far more devastating than Britain’s departure, since France is the second-biggest economy to use the euro. The country also is a central pillar of the EU and its mission of keeping post-war peace via trade and open borders.

The vote will help gauge the strength of global populism after the victories last year of a referendum to take Britain out of the EU and Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential campaign. In France, it is a test of whether voters are ready to overlook the racist and anti-Semitic past of Le Pen’s National Front party.

Le Pen has broadened the party’s appeal by tapping into — and fueling — anger at globalization and fears associated with immigration and Islamic extremism. Macron has argued that France must rethink its labour laws to better compete globally and appealed for unity and tolerance that Le Pen called naive.

Either candidate would lead France into uncharted territory, since neither comes from the mainstream parties that dominate parliament and have run the country for decades. The winner will have to try to build a parliamentary majority in elections next month to make major changes.———

John Leicester in Paris, Alex Turnbull in Henin-Beaumont and Chris den Hond in Le Touquet contributed.</s>PARIS (BLOOMBERG) - Winning the French presidential vote may have been the easy part for Emmanuel Macron.

Now, the 39-year-old, who on Sunday (May 7) defeated the far right National Front's Marine Le Pen with a resounding 66 per cent of the vote, has five weeks to turn his year-old En Marche! - or On the Move! - political movement into a vehicle capable of winning a majority or at least garnering enough seats in parliament to govern or form a coalition.

Without that, Macron could find himself a figurehead from the get-go, incapable of putting into action his campaign promises of economic modernisation. That in turn might embolden populists who France has managed to keep at bay this time, but may not be able to again. The narrower margin of victory over the National Front compared with previous elections shows that parties that see France's central role in the European Union may not get many more chances.

"Macron's biggest challenge now is to win the battle for parliament," Dominique Reynie, politics professor at Sciences Po, said in an interview. "In the French system, if he doesn't have a majority he'd have only limited power, he'd become a constitutional monarch. If he has his own majority, he'd have all the powers which the Fifth Republic grants the president."

The French go back to the polls June 11 and 18 to elect their 577 members of parliament. Although every recent French presidential election has been followed by the winner's party going on to take control of parliament - necessary to name the Cabinet and pass laws - the outcome this time around has been made murky by Macron's lack of an established base.

"The idea since 1958 that whoever is elected president would have a governing majority is about to be shattered," said Nicolas Lebourg, a researcher in politics at the University of Montpellier. "Everything possible has happened so far in this election, and anything can happen. But it's pretty certain that it will be difficult for En Marche! to win a majority."

Macron, whose political movement was created just a year ago, is trying to put together his list of candidates for the legislative elections - a task he has complicated by pledging absolute gender parity and promising that half his candidates will come from outside political circles.

"I don't see a clear majority emerging," said Jerome Fourquet, head of the opinion department at pollsters Ifop. "We could be going toward an ungovernable situation. At best, En Marche! maybe could cobble together a workable majority with a number of smaller centrist parties."

Every French president since 1981 has come from the traditional parties - the Socialists or the center-right Gaullists, now renamed The Republicans. With the ouster of their candidates in the first round, they are in disarray as they go into the legislative elections.

The National Front has never done well in these elections, and the Communist-based Jean-Luc Melenchon, buoyed by his respectable fourth-place showing in the first round, is presenting a full slate of candidates through his France Unbowed party.

There's been only one partial poll so far about the parliamentary elections. OpinionWay said May 3 that En Marche! would win between 249 and 286 seats, the Republicans and their allies 200 to 215, the Socialists 28 to 43, the National Front 15 to 25, and the far left six to eight. But the poll only covered the 535 seats of mainland France, excluding the 42 remaining seats for Corsica, overseas departments, and French living overseas.

"Forecasting the outcome of the June legislative election is almost impossible at this stage," said Antonio Barroso, an analyst at Teneo Intelligence.

Macron has insisted that he expects to win a majority, and ruled out any alliances ahead of the parliamentary elections.

"The French are coherent," he said in an interview May 3 with newspaper Le Depeche. "I don't see why they would elect me and then weeks later vote against my project."

Trouble is, at least some of Macron's support in the Sunday vote came from people backing him as the default candidate to keep Le Pen out, rather than picking him for his program.

The last time a newly created party played a major role in a French legislative election was in 1958, when General Charles De Gaulle came out of retirement after the Fourth Republic collapsed, partly because it had been plagued by unsteady parliaments.

His Union for a New Republic won 189 out of the 466 seats, and even De Gaulle - routinely voted the greatest Frenchman of his century - had to cut deals with Christian Democrats and Socialists to govern.

Despite his bravado, Macron probably knows he'll likely have to accept a coalition, and has dropped hints he's willing, said Montpellier's Lebourg.

"That's the idea of all his talk about taking the best people and ideas from both the left and the right," Lebourg said. "The French people wouldn't necessarily oppose a government of non-political technocrats."

The Socialist Party has indicated it's interested in an alliance with Macron, even if so far he has refused.

"If there are 577 Macron candidates, 577 Socialist candidates, and 577 Melenchon candidates, then it's simple: the Right wins," Socialist Party head Jean-Christophe Cambadelis said April 26 on France 2 television. "We open our arms to all progressives willing to work together."

The Republicans are insisting they can win an outright majority, and their campaign manager Francois Baroin has said he's willing to be prime minister should they win.

"I am ready to lead the government," Baroin said. "We are in France, with a two-round system designed to create strong majorities. We are not in Germany with their coalitions."

With all the forces that manifested themselves in the first round - handing extreme parties on the right and the left more than 40 per cent of the vote - Macron may face an uphill task in forming a new government.

"If Emmanuel Macron wants to be able to govern, he will need a majority in the national assembly and it's far from certain that he will get one," said Yves Marie Cann, an analyst at pollster Elabe.
Voters in France return to the polls for a run-off, to elect either Emmanuel Macron or Marine Le Pen as the new President of France.