France has a new president named Emmanuel Macron! The country erupted in celebration after the he was announced as the projected winner over extreme right-wing opponent Marine Le Pen in videos and tweets that you have to see!

Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron, 39, has become the youngest and newest president of France and the country is in the midst of a major celebration on Sunday, May 7. He beat out Marine Le Pen, 48, in an election that was watched around the world. Emmanuel took 65.5% of the vote and the extremist right-wing politician won over 34.5%. The crowds gathered and absolutely erupted when Emmanuel was revealed as the next president as they ferociously waved their French flags.

Emmanuel Macron: See Photos Of France’s New President

This election came two weeks after the initial election on April 23. Emmanuel was pegged as the favorite to win in the round after he won 8,5000 votes (24%) by the first round on Apr. 23. He surprisingly has never held political office before he served was a part of President Francis Hollande‘s staff as deputy secretary-general of the Élysée. Marine took only 7,6000 votes (21.30%) in the round one. She was considered a controversial candidate because of her anti-immigration policies. Marine also discussed the possibility of France leaving the European Union, which could have led to the end of the organization. People also worried that she be anti-Semitic policies similar to her extremist right-wing policies like her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, 88.

President Donald Trump, 70, congratulated Emmanuel on his victory. “Congratulations to Emmanuel Macron on his big win today as the next President of France. I look very much forward to working with him!” he wrote. Hillary Clinton, 69, also shared her thoughts on the news and said, “Victory for Macron, for France, the EU, & the world. Defeat to those interfering w/democracy. (But the media says I can’t talk about that).” People were super excited and took to Twitter to share the news. “MACRON WINS!!! *exhales*” one user wrote. “Congratulations France! A truly great nation faces the world confidently and doesn’t hide behind walls,” another tweet read. One thrilled French citizen shared a powerful video of the cheering crowds and wrote, “France has rejected hatred and chosen love instead. Vive la France, Macron.”

HollywoodLifers, were you surprised by the election results? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below! </s> Supporters of far-right leader Marine Le Pen are celebrating after she stormed into the French presidential election final vote.

The National Front leader won a 21.58% share behind the centre-left candidate Emmanuel Macron on 23.82%, with 46million of the 47million votes counted.

It means Le Pen, who wants to leave the European Union, is set for the final showdown on May 7 against Macron – the pro-Europe 39-year-old seen as France’s Tony Blair .

Le Pen told supporters she was “honoured” to reach the run-off in the closest election since the Second World War.

She added: “This result is historic. It puts on me a huge responsibility to defend the French nation, its unity, its security, its culture, its prosperity and its independence.”

Yesterday was the first time in French history that the incumbent president – Socialist Francois Hollande – did not run due to poor ratings.

And with no established parties making it through, as conservative Francois Fillon garnered 19.96% and far-leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon came in on 19.49%, the French political landscape has now changed for ever.

A win for Le Pen, 48, would bring the possibility of a “Frexit” vote and an anti-immigrant lurch to the right.

While victory for En Marche! chief Macron – still the bookies’ favourite – could lead to a revival of centrism across Europe, which has fallen into electoral failure in the past 10 years.

There was a bigger than expected turnout with about 80% of the population voting.

In London, thousands of expats queued to cast their vote in Kensington, some waiting two hours.

Voter Julien Brunel, 33, said: “I still haven’t made up my mind, thankfully I have a long time as there is a very long queue.”

The election was held with France on high security alert after a policeman was shot dead by a jihadi in Paris three days earlier. More than 50,000 officers were on duty.
• Born in Neuilly sur Seine on August 5, 1968. Youngest daughter of former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
• She is president of the National Front party and was a candidate in the 2012 presidential election.
• Born in Amiens, December 21, 1977. His father was a professor of neurology and his mother a physician.
• Wife Brigitte Trogneux is 24 years older and was his teacher at school.
• He founded party En Marche! in April 2016 to enable him to run for president.
• Huge supporter of EU and has pledged to maintain close ties to Europe. </s> Paris: Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France on Sunday with a business-friendly vision of European integration, defeating Marine Le Pen, a far-right nationalist who threatened to take France out of the European Union, early projections showed.

The centrist's emphatic victory, which also smashed the dominance of France’s mainstream parties, will bring huge relief to European allies who had feared another populist upheaval to follow Britain's vote to quit the EU and Donald Trump's election as U.S. president.

The 39-year-old former investment banker, who served for two years as economy minister but has never previously held elected office, will now become France's youngest leader since Napoleon with a promise to transcend outdated left-right divisions.

Three projections, issued within minutes of polling stations closing at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT), showed Macron beating Le Pen by around 65 percent to 35 - a gap wider than the 20 or so percentage points that pre-election surveys had pointed to.

Even so, it was a record performance for the National Front, a party whose anti-immigrant policies until recently made it a pariah in French politics, and underlined the scale of the divisions that he must try to heal.

Le Pen's high-spending, anti-globalisation 'France-first' policies may have unnerved financial markets but they appealed to many poorer members of society against a background of high unemployment, social tensions and security concerns.

The 48-year-old's share of the vote was set to be almost twice that won by her father Jean-Marie, the last National Front candidate to qualify for a presidential runoff, who was trounced by Jacques Chirac in 2002.

Macron's immediate challenge will be to secure a majority in next month's parliamentary election for En Marche! (Onwards!), his political movement that is barely a year old, in order to implement his programme.

However, at least one opinion poll published in the run-up to the second round has indicated that this could be within reach. </s> Paris: French voters go to the polls on Sunday in the first round of parliamentary elections with President Emmanuel Macron's party appearing well-placed to gain a commanding majority.

Macron has enjoyed a smooth start in the five weeks since he beat far-right candidate Marine Le Pen to become France's youngest-ever president, naming a cabinet that crosses left-right lines and making a big impression at international summits.

His centrist Republique en Marche (Republic on the Move, REM) party, which he only founded in April 2016 as a platform for his presidential bid, now needs a clear majority in the National Assembly for him to push through the reforms he has promised.

A host of opinion polls show Macron's party could take around 30 per cent of the vote today, putting it in pole position to secure an absolute majority in the second round a week later.

That could translate to as many as 400 seats in the 577-seat chamber. REM has already had a boost after its candidates came first in 10 of the 11 French overseas constituencies that voted before the mainland.

If no candidate wins over 50 per cent in the first round, the two top-placed go into the second round - as well as any candidate who won the votes of over 12.5 percent of the electorate.

Polling stations open at 8 am (local time) and close in the largest cities at 8 pm (local time).

More than 50,000 police will be on patrol in a country still under a state of emergency following a wave of attacks that have killed more than 230 people since 2015.

In the latest incident, which took place on Tuesday, a 40-year-old self-radicalised Algerian was shot and wounded after attacking a policeman with a hammer outside Paris' Notre Dame cathedral.

French voters have traditionally rallied behind their new leader in the legislative elections that follow the presidential ballot.

Macron's predecessors Francois Hollande in 2012, Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 and Jacques Chirac in 2002 all won outright majorities. Unlike Macron, however, they all came from long-established parties.

REM reflects the president's desire for a new brand of politics. Initially dismissed by Macron's opponents as a movement of young activists without any real roots, it will field 530 candidates on Sunday.

In a bid to renew the political scene, many have never stood for office before, such as Marie Sara, a rare female bullfighter, who is taking on a senior member of Le Pen's National Front in southern France, Gilbert Collard.

Macron has banned all REM candidates from employing family members if elected and they must not perform consultancy work while being lawmakers.

The edicts follow the scandal that sunk the presidential chances of Francois Fillon, candidate for the right-wing Republicans party, who is facing criminal charges for paying his wife Penelope more than 900,000 euros (USD 1.0 million) as his parliamentary assistant. </s> - French voters elected centrist Emmanuel Macron as the country's youngest president ever on Sunday, delivering a resounding victory to the unabashedly pro-European former investment banker and strengthening France's place as a central pillar of the European Union.

A crowd of Macron supporters roared with delight at the news, jubilantly waving red, white and blue tricolor flags at a victory party outside the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Marine Le Pen, his far-right opponent in the presidential runoff, quickly called the 39-year-old Macron to concede defeat after voters rejected her "French-first" nationalism by a large margin.

The result wasn't even close: Pollsters projected that Macron won 65 percent of the votes. Le Pen's projected 35 percent score was lower than her polling numbers earlier in the campaign, and dashed her hopes that the populist wave which swept Donald Trump into the White House would also carry her to France's presidential Elysee Palace.

Macron's victory marked the third time in six months — following elections in Austria and the Netherlands — that European voters shot down far-right populists who wanted to restore borders across Europe. The election of a French president who championed European unity could strengthen the EU's hand in its complex divorce proceedings with Britain, which voted last year to leave the bloc.

In a statement minutes after the last polls closed Sunday night, Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced Macron's victory.

"(This) testifies to the lucidity of the voters, who rejected the deadly project of the extreme right," he said, adding that the presidential vote showed an embrace of the EU.

Many French voters backed Macron reluctantly, not because they agreed with his politics but simply to keep out Le Pen and her far-right National Front party, which is still tainted by its long anti-Semitic and racist history.

After the most closely watched and unpredictable French presidential campaign in recent memory, many voters rejected the runoff choice altogether. Pollsters projected that French voters cast blank or spoiled ballots in record numbers Sunday.

Macron now becomes not only France's youngest-ever president but also one of its most unlikely. Until now, modern France had been governed either by the Socialists or the conservatives — but both Macron and Le Pen upended those political traditions.

Unknown to voters before his turbulent 2014-16 tenure as France's pro-business economy minister, Macron took a giant gamble by quitting the government of outgoing Socialist President Francois Hollande to run as an independent in his first electoral campaign.

His startup political movement — optimistically named, "En Marche!," or "Forward!" — caught fire in just one year, harnessing voters' hunger for new faces and new ideas and steering France into unchartered political territory.

In a first for postwar France, neither of the mainstream parties on the left or the right qualified in the first round of voting on April 23 for Sunday's winner-takes-all duel between Macron and Le Pen.

Despite her loss, Le Pen's advancement to the runoff for the first time marked a breakthrough for the 48-year-old. She had placed third in the 2012 presidential vote, underscoring a growing acceptance for her fierce anti-immigration, France-first nationalism among disgruntled voters.

Le Pen immediately turned her focus to France's upcoming legislative elections in June, where Macron will need a working majority to govern effectively.

"I call on all patriots to join us," she said. "France will need you more than ever in the months ahead."

Le Pen said she got 11 million votes. If confirmed, that would be double the score of her father, National Front co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, at the same stage in the 2002 presidential election.

The candidates' polar-opposite visions presented the 47 million registered voters with the starkest possible choice. Le Pen's closed borders faced off against Macron's open ones; his commitment to free trade ran against her proposals to protect the French from global economic competition and immigration. Her desire to free France from the EU and the shared euro currency contrasted with his argument that both are essential for the future of Europe's third-largest economy.

As well as capitalizing on voter rejection of the left-right monopoly on power, Macron also got lucky.

One of his most dangerous opponents, conservative former Prime Minister Francois Fillon, was hobbled by allegations that his family benefited from cushy taxpayer-funded jobs for years.

On the left, the Socialist Party imploded, its candidate abandoned by voters who wanted to punish Hollande, France's most unpopular president since World War II. Hollande himself realized he was unelectable and decided not to run again.

Macron takes charge of a nation that, when Britain leaves the EU in 2019, will become the EU's only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

He has promised a France that would stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin but that also would seek to work with the Russian leader on what he says will be one of his top priorities: fighting the Islamic State group, whose extremists have claimed or inspired multiple attacks in France since 2015.

France has been in a state of emergency since then and 50,000 security forces were used to safeguard Sunday's vote.

Macron is expected to keep up French military operations against extremists in Iraq and Syria and Africa's Sahel region, and maintain pressure on Russia over Ukraine and support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

With the United States, Macron says he wants continued intelligence-sharing and cooperation at the United Nations and hopes to persuade Trump not to pull the U.S. out of a global emissions-cutting deal against climate change.

Domestically, Macron inherits a deeply troubled and divided nation of 67 million people. The French are riven by anxieties about terrorism and chronic unemployment, worried about the cultural, economic and religious impact of immigration and fear France's ability to compete against giants like China and Google.

His proposed remedies include both economic reforms and his own infectious, upbeat optimism that France need not resign itself to continuing economic and social decline, especially as part of an EU competing together against other powers.

The campaign ended Friday night with a hacking attack and document leak targeting Macron. France's government cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, is investigating. Macron's team said the hack aimed to destabilize the vote. But the timing of the leak appeared too late to have a significant impact on voting intentions. </s> The stakes are high ahead of the contest between the pro-European Macron (left), a 39-year-old former economy minister, and far-right leader Le Pen (right), the 48-year-old scion of the National Front party. — File picPARIS, May 3 — French presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen face off in a televised debate today which is expected to be bitter, personal and potentially decisive ahead of voting this weekend.

The stakes are high ahead of the contest between the pro-European Macron, a 39-year-old former economy minister, and far-right leader Le Pen, the 48-year-old scion of the National Front party.

Their starkly different views of Europe, immigration, the economy and French identity will be explored for the first time face-to-face following a week marked by bruising clashes between them.

Polls show Macron holding a hefty but narrowing lead in the polls of 59 per cent versus 41 per cent, but previous debates during the rollercoaster French campaign have quickly shifted public opinion.

“Our goal is to avoid being dragged into mud-slinging,” an aide to Macron told AFP on condition of anonymity ahead of the two hours and 20 minutes of exchanges between the candidates.

Whatever the outcome, the event marks a new step into the mainstream for Le Pen, whose party was once considered by France’s political establishment to be an extremist fringe of racists that should be boycotted.

When her father Jean-Marie made it into the final round of the presidential election in 2002, his conservative opponent Jacques Chirac refused to debate him out of fear of “normalising hate and intolerance”.

Fifteen years later, Le Pen scored 21.3 per cent in the first round of the French election on April 23 after successfully softening the FN’s image — but without fully removing doubt about the party’s core beliefs.

She has consistently sought to paint her ex-investment banker rival as the continuation of unpopular President Francois Hollande and an advocate of uncontrolled globalisation, the financial sector and immigration.

“If he finds himself in difficulty, he can always ask Francois Hollande to come and hold his hand. I won’t complain,” Le Pen wrote on Twitter yesterday in a message signed by her personally.

Her sister Marie-Caroline compared him to “a boy with a bucket and spade” after the last debate on April 5 before the first round of voting.

Trailing in the polls, the face-off will be Le Pen’s biggest chance in front of a television audience to impress millions of views or induce an error by her opponent that could tilt the election in her favour.

Macron is expected to be wary of making mistakes but has signalled his intention to take on Le Pen and challenge what he calls “dangerous” ideas to tackle the country’s deep economic and social problems.

“I want to go head-to-head, to get to the bottom of the issues, to show that these are false solutions,” the independent centrist told BFM television yesterday.

Recent doubt about Le Pen’s stance on withdrawing France from the euro common currency could also give him an opportunity to target what is seen as a risky and unpopular policy by many voters.

A close aide said Macron would home in on “the complete backtrack on leaving the euro”.

Le Pen’s niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen suggested at the weekend that talks about leaving the euro could take years, but Le Pen promised yesterday night to stick with her plans to introduce a new French franc if approved in a referendum.

“It’s not an unknown, it’s not a jump into the void,” she said during an interview with TF1 television.

In the face of the attacks on his background as a highly educated civil servant and banker, Macron is also expected to emphasise his personal story as a self-made man born to two doctors in provincial Amiens.

“I wasn’t born in a chateau,” he said this week, referring to the Le Pen family mansion on the outskirts of Paris where Marine and her sisters were brought up.

Sparks flew when they faced each other in the presidential debates before the first round of voting, when Le Pen memorably accused Macron of waffling for seven minutes and saying nothing.

Macron said she was transforming France’s millions of Muslims into “enemies of the republic.” — AFP </s> Mr Macron won by 66.06% to 33.94% to become, at 39, the country’s youngest president.

Mr Macron will also become the first president from outside the two traditional main parties since the modern republic’s foundation in 1958.

He said that a new page was being turned in French history.

“I want it to be a page of hope and renewed trust,” he said.

Mr Macron said he had heard “the rage, anxiety and doubt that a lot of you have expressed” and vowed to spend his five years in office “fighting the forces of division that undermine France”.

He said he would “guarantee the unity of the nation and… defend and protect Europe.”

In his speech to the crowd, he said: “Tonight you won, France won. Everyone told us it was impossible, but they don’t know France.”

But he repeated a number of times that the task facing him and the country was enormous.

He said: “We have the strength, the energy and the will – and we will not give in to fear.”

His mention of Ms Le Pen drew loud boos, and he said he would do all he could to ensure in future there would be no reason to vote for extremism. </s> PARIS (BLOOMBERG) - Winning the French presidential vote may have been the easy part for Emmanuel Macron.

Now, the 39-year-old, who on Sunday (May 7) defeated the far right National Front's Marine Le Pen with a resounding 66 per cent of the vote, has five weeks to turn his year-old En Marche! - or On the Move! - political movement into a vehicle capable of winning a majority or at least garnering enough seats in parliament to govern or form a coalition.

Without that, Macron could find himself a figurehead from the get-go, incapable of putting into action his campaign promises of economic modernisation. That in turn might embolden populists who France has managed to keep at bay this time, but may not be able to again. The narrower margin of victory over the National Front compared with previous elections shows that parties that see France's central role in the European Union may not get many more chances.

"Macron's biggest challenge now is to win the battle for parliament," Dominique Reynie, politics professor at Sciences Po, said in an interview. "In the French system, if he doesn't have a majority he'd have only limited power, he'd become a constitutional monarch. If he has his own majority, he'd have all the powers which the Fifth Republic grants the president."

The French go back to the polls June 11 and 18 to elect their 577 members of parliament. Although every recent French presidential election has been followed by the winner's party going on to take control of parliament - necessary to name the Cabinet and pass laws - the outcome this time around has been made murky by Macron's lack of an established base.

"The idea since 1958 that whoever is elected president would have a governing majority is about to be shattered," said Nicolas Lebourg, a researcher in politics at the University of Montpellier. "Everything possible has happened so far in this election, and anything can happen. But it's pretty certain that it will be difficult for En Marche! to win a majority."

Macron, whose political movement was created just a year ago, is trying to put together his list of candidates for the legislative elections - a task he has complicated by pledging absolute gender parity and promising that half his candidates will come from outside political circles.

"I don't see a clear majority emerging," said Jerome Fourquet, head of the opinion department at pollsters Ifop. "We could be going toward an ungovernable situation. At best, En Marche! maybe could cobble together a workable majority with a number of smaller centrist parties."

Every French president since 1981 has come from the traditional parties - the Socialists or the center-right Gaullists, now renamed The Republicans. With the ouster of their candidates in the first round, they are in disarray as they go into the legislative elections.

The National Front has never done well in these elections, and the Communist-based Jean-Luc Melenchon, buoyed by his respectable fourth-place showing in the first round, is presenting a full slate of candidates through his France Unbowed party.

There's been only one partial poll so far about the parliamentary elections. OpinionWay said May 3 that En Marche! would win between 249 and 286 seats, the Republicans and their allies 200 to 215, the Socialists 28 to 43, the National Front 15 to 25, and the far left six to eight. But the poll only covered the 535 seats of mainland France, excluding the 42 remaining seats for Corsica, overseas departments, and French living overseas.

"Forecasting the outcome of the June legislative election is almost impossible at this stage," said Antonio Barroso, an analyst at Teneo Intelligence.

Macron has insisted that he expects to win a majority, and ruled out any alliances ahead of the parliamentary elections.

"The French are coherent," he said in an interview May 3 with newspaper Le Depeche. "I don't see why they would elect me and then weeks later vote against my project."

Trouble is, at least some of Macron's support in the Sunday vote came from people backing him as the default candidate to keep Le Pen out, rather than picking him for his program.

The last time a newly created party played a major role in a French legislative election was in 1958, when General Charles De Gaulle came out of retirement after the Fourth Republic collapsed, partly because it had been plagued by unsteady parliaments.

His Union for a New Republic won 189 out of the 466 seats, and even De Gaulle - routinely voted the greatest Frenchman of his century - had to cut deals with Christian Democrats and Socialists to govern.

Despite his bravado, Macron probably knows he'll likely have to accept a coalition, and has dropped hints he's willing, said Montpellier's Lebourg.

"That's the idea of all his talk about taking the best people and ideas from both the left and the right," Lebourg said. "The French people wouldn't necessarily oppose a government of non-political technocrats."

The Socialist Party has indicated it's interested in an alliance with Macron, even if so far he has refused.

"If there are 577 Macron candidates, 577 Socialist candidates, and 577 Melenchon candidates, then it's simple: the Right wins," Socialist Party head Jean-Christophe Cambadelis said April 26 on France 2 television. "We open our arms to all progressives willing to work together."

The Republicans are insisting they can win an outright majority, and their campaign manager Francois Baroin has said he's willing to be prime minister should they win.

"I am ready to lead the government," Baroin said. "We are in France, with a two-round system designed to create strong majorities. We are not in Germany with their coalitions."

With all the forces that manifested themselves in the first round - handing extreme parties on the right and the left more than 40 per cent of the vote - Macron may face an uphill task in forming a new government.

"If Emmanuel Macron wants to be able to govern, he will need a majority in the national assembly and it's far from certain that he will get one," said Yves Marie Cann, an analyst at pollster Elabe. </s> Emmanuel Macron has been inaugurated as French President at the Elysee Palace in France.

Macron, who won the presidential race against the National Front's Marine le Pen with 66 per cent of the vote, is the country's youngest President at the age of 39.

At the inauguration in Paris, Macron said his strong mandate would give French people a new-found confidence; he is taking over from Francois Hollande, who struggled to bring down the nation's high unemployment.

Read more: As Juncker criticises France's overspending, is the Macron honeymoon over?

Macron, a former banker, has also promised to reform the European Union during his time as leader. Demonstrating his commitment to Europe, one of his first acts as President will be to visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin tomorrow.

The new French President is expected to be tough on Brexit, and has previously indicated he has is eyes on London's euro clearing market.

Jean Pisani-Ferry, Macron's economic adviser, said last week that Macron will not be seeking to "punish" the UK for Brexit, but that France and Britain now have diverging interests, paving the way for difficult negotiations.
Macron wins the election, earning 66.1% of the vote to Le Pen's 33.9%, becoming the youngest French head of state since Napoleon.