French presidential election: news and updates

French far-right leader and former presidential candidate Marine Le Pen says she has been ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation because she tweeted out graphic images of ISIS’s violence, including the execution of American journalist James Foley.

The court order appears to be part of a larger investigation into these tweets, which Le Pen sent in December 2015.

With the first exit polls announced at 8 pm Paris time, the party of French President Emmanuel Macron, President Trump’s least favorite European leader, is now projected to have won a decisive majority of the seats in French parliament.

Just over a year ago, La République En Marche, the new center-left party founded by now-39-year-old upstart Emmanuel Macron, didn’t even exist. Trying to become the youngest president in French history was one thing; creating an entire party to take over the parliament — giving him the actual power to govern — was another thing entirely. Experts pontificated that in the unlikely event Macron were able to actually win the presidency, once in office he would potentially be severely hampered by the rather radical handicap of representing a party that boasted a tiny minority of seats in parliament and thus no real legislative power.

French voters elected centrist independent Emmanuel Macron as president on Sunday. A 39-year-old former investment banker, Macron will become the country’s youngest leader ever.

Although Macron defeated far-right populist Marine Le Pen, who leads the National Front party, by a whopping 33 points, France remains a deeply divided country. Anxieties persist over immigration, terrorism, globalization, and chronic unemployment.

Emmanuel Macron, a center-left technocrat from the new En Marche party, won the French election on Sunday — beating the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen by a decisive 65.5 percent to 34.5 percent. But what does this mean for France, Europe, and the rest of the world?

A lot, actually. The French election was hugely significant for the country’s future as well, centering on fundamental value questions like tolerance and French identity. It was also full of twists and turns, ranging from Le Pen resigning from the leadership of the National Front to a last-minute release of Macron’s emails (allegedly stolen by Russian hackers).

PARIS — French voters faced a historic choice Sunday between a far-right presidential candidate and a centrist — and they overwhelmingly elected the one who embraced the European Union, immigration, free trade, and LGBTQ rights.

In making Emmanuel Macron the youngest person ever to run France, voters decisively rejected Marine Le Pen, who had alarmed many inside and outside the country by her pointed attacks on Islamic fundamentalism, immigration, hostility to Europe, close ties to Russia, and socially conservative platform.

No matter what happens in Sunday’s French presidential election, voters there will be making history.

The race for France’s top job has come down to a head-to-head competition between Marine Le Pen, a far-right populist, an Emmanuel Macron, an arch-centrist defined by his pro-EU and pro-immigrant stances. Neither of them represent the two parties — the center-left Socialists and center-right Republicans — that have traditionally dominated French politics. The parties, discredited by incompetence and scandal, have instead been overtaken by one formerly fringe party and one entirely new one. It’s as if the Democrats and Republicans were out of contention in the last week of a presidential election.

PARIS — Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, France’s most famous Nazi hunters, thought their activist days were mostly behind them. After decades spent tirelessly tracking down Nazi war criminals across the globe, the couple — now 78 and 82, respectively — had finally settled into a quieter life.

Then Marine Le Pen arrived on the French political scene.

PARIS — With mere hours left before French voters head to the polls to elect a new president on Sunday, centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron’s political campaign revealed it had been hit by a “massive and coordinated” hacking attack that dumped some 9 GB of information — including tens of thousands of internal emails and other documents — online for all to see.

The stolen information was posted to the text-sharing site Pastebin, a site commonly used by hackers, by an unknown user going by the name EMLEAKS (EM = Emmanuel Macron). Le Monde reported that the first documents were relayed via 4chan, and the hashtag #MacronLeaks quickly began trending on Twitter. WikiLeaks also tweeted a link to the cache of documents, saying it “contains many tens of thousands [of] emails, photos, attachments up to April 24, 2017.” It said it was not responsible for the leak itself, however.

Marine Le Pen, the face of the French far-right, is trying to bring American-style identity politics to France — wagering that direct appeals to the country’s women, Jews, and secular-minded voters will help her win the French presidency despite widespread concerns about her hardline views on immigration, outsiders, and globalization.

That strategy seems to have helped her ride a wave of general public dissatisfaction with the status quo into second place with 21.7 percent of the voting after the first round of voting on April 23. She was slightly edged out by Emmanuel Macron, a centrist banker turned politician who is running for elected office for the first time.

Most polls and pundits predict that Emmanuel Macron will easily win the French presidential election on May 7 with about 60 percent of the vote. Macron is a young cosmopolitan former banker and socialist minister, socially liberal, pro-Europe and pro-immigration, who favors a Nordic-style makeover of France that would combine fiscal discipline, cuts in public spending, and labor market reforms with policies to increase entrepreneurship, lower unemployment, and improve the flexibility of the French economy and its workers. His rival is Marine Le Pen, the notorious leader of the virulently anti-immigration, anti-EU National Front.

A tough debate this week — she called him a “smirking banker,” and he called her a “high priestess of fear” — so far appears not to have significantly reshaped the race.

PARIS — Far-right French presidential Marine Le Pen has a simple a message she wants to get across to the country’s gay community: Cast a vote for her in Sunday’s presidential elections because she and her party will protect them from Islamist violence.

It’s a tough sell for Le Pen, whose platform opposes same-sex marriage and adoption and whose father — who created the party she now leads — has called homosexuality a “biological anomaly” and said those with HIV should be housed in “AIDS-atoriums.”

Former President Barack Obama has endorsed his first candidate for office since leaving office — and it’s not a fellow Democrat. In fact, it’s not even an American.

“I am supporting Emmanuel Macron to lead you forward,” Obama said in English in a video addressed to the French people just days before Macron faces far-right candidate Marine Le Pen Sunday in an election that will determine the country’s next president.

PARIS — She called him a “smirking banker.” He called her a “parasite.”

Just four days before French voters return to the polls on May 7 to elect a president, the two remaining candidates for the presidency, centrist Emmanuel Macron of En Marche and far-right Marine Le Pen of the National Front, sat down for a nationally televised 140-minute debate.

Marine Le Pen gave a rousing speech Monday in honor of May Day, a traditional European spring holiday that has morphed, over time, into a celebration of the working class.

Looking out at the crowd at an enormous conference center north of Paris, she spoke of the uniqueness of France’s national landscape, from the three borders facing the sea to the mountains of the country’s interior. And she appealed to what she sees as French values — values that include “discussion, compromise, balance, the freedom of individuals.”

The recent election in France has, once again, raised questions about the political fate of Europe — and of the West more generally.

In France, the election results were more or less what pollsters expected: Centrist independent Emmanuel Macron and far-right populist Marine Le Pen advanced to the second and final round of voting.

We know which pair of France’s 11 presidential candidates will face off in next month’s decisive second round of voting. Now we’re learning a lot more about why the last two standing are centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who will face each other in a runoff on May 7.

This result, while largely in line with polling expectations, is still a huge event in the long-term arc of French politics. To understand why this matters so much, and what it tells us about the wave of populism sweeping Europe more broadly, we’ve put together nine maps and charts that shed light on what just happened — the forces behind it, who actually supported which candidates and why, and what’s likely to happen next.

As soon as polls in France closed Sunday for the first round of voting in the presidential election, a very uniquely French thing happened: Virtually all of the defeated presidential candidates and other political leaders promptly coalesced around centrist Emmanuel Macron, who faces off against far-right populist Marine Le Pen on May 7.

The endorsements came quickly, and they were notably enthusiastic. And yet they were less about Macron as a politician and more about conveying a simple message to the French voting public: Le Pen and her National Front pose an existential threat to the fundamental values of the French state and must be thwarted at all costs.

A 39-year-old former banker with zero political experience just made a whole lot of European leaders really happy.

Emmanuel Macron, a young, centrist, pro–European Union candidate, just came out on top in the first round of voting in the French presidential elections, winning 23.7 percent of the vote, according to exit polls. He was followed closely by far-right populist Marine Le Pen, who pulled in 21.7 percent. The two of them will now face off in a runoff election on May 7, and polls show Macron with a solid chance of winning.

Marine Le Pen is a leading candidate in the French presidential election, the first round of which is taking place this weekend on April 23. It will be followed by a runoff election on May 7.

Le Pen is the leader of France’s far-right political party, the National Front (FN). She won the role of party president in 2011, but the party has been a part of her life since birth: Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was co-founder of the party and the leader for more than 40 years. Under her father’s leadership, the National Front was seen as xenophobic and anti-Semitic. That’s largely due to Le Pen’s repeated comments dismissing Nazi gas chambers as a mere “detail of history,” for which he was convicted for “contesting crimes against humanity.”

Former President Barack Obama called current French presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron today, and it was frankly adorable.

Macron was so excited about it that he tweeted a video clip of him talking to Obama over a speakerphone, flags of the European Union and France conspicuously draped behind the desk.

On Sunday night, French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen of the Front National party denied French responsibility for the brutal fate of the 76,000 Jews deported from France during the Second World War. Only 3,000 returned.

In so doing, she reignited a conversation on both the FN’s xenophobic roots and the French state’s role in World War II. She may also have irreparably damaged her chances for the presidency.

Marine Le Pen, the face and leader of the French far-right Front National party, believes France should exit the European Union, drop the euro, and fight radical Islam, and not necessarily in that order.

“The division is no longer between the right and the left,” she told her supporters this weekend, “but between patriots and [believers in] globalization.”