Not, perhaps, the best of results for France and Europe, but by no means the worst either. The far-right National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen, appears not to have topped the first-round poll, as some had hoped and many others had feared, but she does appear to have taken second place, which takes her into the run-off in two weeks’ time. There, she will face Emmanuel Macron, of the movement, En Marche, which he founded as a vehicle for his presidential run. Macron came first with an estimated 23.7 per cent of the vote; Le Pen took an estimated 21.9.

Looking ahead to 7 May, the likelihood is that the conventional left, right and centre join forces to oppose Le Pen, and Macron is swept to the Elysee Palace, without any formal party to back him, at the tender age of 39. Marine Le Pen thus faces a similar fate to the one that befell her father, after he unexpectedly pipped the Socialist, Lionel Jospin, to reach the run-off in 2002. Jacques Chirac, until then an unpopular incumbent, easily clinched a second term thanks to an electorate shocked by the first-round result.

In fact, for all her attempts to modernise and detoxify her party, Marine Le Pen received only a couple of percentage points more than her father before her – which suggests that the far-right constituency in France remains circumscribed, at less than 25 per cent of those who turn out to vote. The pattern in the Netherlands general election earlier this year, where a sharp increase in the far-right vote had also been widely expected, was similar.

MORE:   http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/marine-le-pen-emmanuel-macron-french-election-2017-far-right-nationalist-populism-europe-a7698281.html