The Diplomat
As usual, French voters living in Spain behaved very differently yesterday from their compatriots in France in the first round of the presidential election.
According to the official results, the French president, Emmanuel Macron (of La Republique en Marche), won the first round in France as a whole with 27.35 percent of the votes, followed by the ultra-right candidate, Marine Le Pen (of the Front National), 23.97 percent, so that both will compete for the final victory in the second round on April 24.
The third most voted candidate was Jean-Luc Mélenchon (of La France Insoumise, left), with 21.70 percent, and the socialist Anne Hidalgo barely reached two percent. Turnout was 65 percent, the lowest since 2002. Conservative, socialist and ecologist candidates have called for a vote for Macron in the second round to defeat Le Pen. Polls give victory to the incumbent with 52 of the vote.
A total of 2.5 million French vote abroad, representing three percent of the electorate. In the case of French residents in Spain, the official results give the victory to Macron with a resounding 40 percent (46.63% in Madrid) and the second position to Mélenchon, with 20 percent (20.52% in Madrid). Le Pen is in seventh position, with only 3.54 percent (below even Hidalgo, with 4.07 percent).
As for the reactions in Spain to the French elections, the spokeswoman of the Government, Isabel Rodríguez, declared yesterday to Antena 3 that the elections, and in particular the very low results of Hidalgo, are the result of the “exceptional and very specific circumstances that the French socialist family is living”, but she recalled that “President Macron himself comes from French socialism”.
For his part, the new general coordinator of the PP, Elías Bendodo, declared that “the most important thing is that moderation has won”. “The PP fully identifies with Macron’s policies”, “liberal policies that are working in the French economy and that the PP considers them right and makes them its own, without any doubt”, he added.
The MEP and head of the International Secretariat of Podemos, Idoia Villanueva, declared that “it is bad news that France has to choose between neoliberal policies that feed the rise of the extreme right and the extreme right” and a spokesman for Vox described as “anti-democratic” the creation of a cordon sanitaire to prevent the triumph of Le Pen and celebrated the “collapse” of French socialism, “a foretaste of the fate that awaits the PSOE in Spain”.
