“Even if he wins 60 percent of the vote, that does not mean
that 60 percent of the French have voted for Emmanuel Macron,” said Alexis Massart, director of the European School of Political and Social Science at the University of Lille.
A big question now is where those voters will turn — to the center with Mr. Macron or farther to the right with Ms.
Also in play are the 19 percent of voters who went in the first round with the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
She said she planned on abstaining because she did not want to choose between “a racist party and a banker party.”
No matter who wins, the country will be abandoning a political order
that has shaped it for the last 59 years, when it was dominated by the country’s two mainstream parties — the Socialist Party and the center-right Republicans.
Even before the last-minute attempt at sabotage, the election represented a big step into the political unknown for France — the first time in more than 50 years
that neither of the establishment parties will be represented in the final round.
