French President Emmanuel Macron was on course Sunday to win a second term by defeating far-right leader Marine Le Pen in presidential elections, projections showed.
was set to win 57.0-58.5 per cent of the vote compared with Le Pen on 41.5-43.0 per cent, according to projections by polling firms for French television channels based on a sample of the vote count.
The result is narrower than their second-round clash in 2017 when the same two candidates met in the run-off and Macron polled over 66 per cent of the vote.
The relatively comfortable margin of victory will nonetheless give Macron some confidence as he heads into a second five-year mandate, but the election also represents the closest the far-right has ever come to winning power in France.
A victory by Le Pen, accused by opponents of having cosy ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, would have sent shockwaves around the world comparable to the 2016 polls that led to Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump’s election in the United States.
The outcome, expected to be confirmed by official results overnight, will cause immense relief in Europe after fears a Le Pen presidency would leave the continent rudderless following Brexit and the departure of German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Left-leaning EU leaders including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had pleaded with France in the run-up to the vote to choose Macron over his rival, in an unusual intervention published in Le Monde newspaper.
Macron will be the first French president to win re-election since Jacques Chirac in 2002 after his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande left office after only one term.
Ex-merchant banker Macron's decision to run for the presidency in 2017 and set up his own grassroots movement from scratch up-ended the old certainties about French politics - something that may come back to bite him in June's parliamentary elections.
Instead of capping the rise of radical forces as he said it would, Macron's non-partisan centrism has sped the electoral collapse of the mainstream left and right, whose two candidates could between them only muster 6.5% of the first-round vote on April 10.
One notable winner has been the hard-left Jean-Luc Melenchon, who scored 22% in the first round and has already staked a claim to become Macron's prime minister in an awkward "cohabitation" if his group does well in the June vote.
Source: News81, and from the Google