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2022 FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

‘It’s not over’: Marine Le Pen concedes defeat but vows to carry on the fight

Defeated far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen vowed on Sunday night that she would not abandon the French people after losing out to Emmanuel Macron in the second round vote.

Published: 24 April 2022 20:35 CEST
'It's not over': Marine Le Pen concedes defeat but vows to carry on the fight
French far-right party Rassemblement National (RN) presidential candidate Marine Le Pen delivers a speech at the Pavillon d'Armenonville in Paris on April 24, 2022 after the announcement of the first projections by polling firms of the French presidential election's second round results. (Photo by Thomas SAMSON / AFP)

Losing candidate Marine Le Pen gave a speech to supporters some 15 minutes after the projected result was announced and after she had called Emmanuel Macron to concede defeat.

Defiant Le Pen, the head of the far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally) party thanked the millions of voters who had backed her to be president of France whilst attacking the victorious candidate.

In front of cheering supports she said the fact that around 43 percent of voters backed her represented a “brilliant victory”.

“In this defeat I can feel hope,” she said in front of supporters who chanted “Marine! Marine!”

French far-right party Rassemblement National (RN) presidential candidate Marine Le Pen (R) is applauded by supporters as she embraces her mother Pierrette in Paris, on April 24, 2022, following the announcement of the results of the second round of the French presidential election. – French President Emmanuel Macron was on course to win a second term by defeating far-right leader Marine Le Pen in presidential elections, projections showed. (Photo by JOEL SAGET / AFP)

“I fear the five years to come will not break with the brutal five years we have had. I will continue my commitment to France and the French.

“It’s not over.”

She said the “historic score” showed the defiance of the French people towards French and European leaders.

Le Pen said she would never abandon the French people and said she would lead the campaign for the parliamentary elections. She had previously talked about resigning and leaving politics if she lost this election. 

Speaking about the winner she said: “I fear Emmanuel Macron will do nothing to repair the fractures that divide our country.”

She finished her speech by starting a rendition of the French national anthem with her supporters joining in.

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: Macron’s attempts to tame world leaders shows he’s more a thinker than a diplomat

French President Emmanuel Macron's flawed efforts to charm the world's autocratic and populist leaders have previously ended in failure or even humiliation. Taking the Chinese president to the Pyrenees won't change that record, writes John Lichfield.

Published: 7 May 2024 12:06 CEST
OPINION: Macron's attempts to tame world leaders shows he's more a thinker than a diplomat

Emmanuel Macron used to fancy himself as a lion-tamer.

There wasn’t a murderous dictator or mendacious populist that the French President would not try to charm: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayip Erdogan, Victor Orban.

The results, overall, have been poor. Sometimes Macron has been eaten, diplomatically-speaking. Years of trying to smooth-talk Vladimir Putin – with invitations to Versailles and the presidential retreat at Fort Brégancon and the long-table talks in the Kremlin – ended in disillusion and humiliation.

Macron’s attempts to create a blokeish friendship with Boris Johnson ended in cross-Channel exchanges of insults and accusations. His mission to find a core, reasonable Donald Trump ended in the discovery that there was no reasonable Donald Trump, just a self-obsessed, shallow deal-maker or deal-breaker.

And now President Xi Jinping of China. The two presidents and their wives are on an away-day to the French Pyrenees (Tuesday), visiting a region dear to Macron since his childhood.

The first day of Xi’s French state visit in Paris yesterday seems to have produced very little. The Chinese president promised to send no arms to Russia but that is a long-standing promise that he has, technically-speaking, kept.

Xi is reported to have promised to restrict sales to Moscow of “secondary materials” which can be used to make arms. We will see.

The Chinese leader also agreed to support Macron’s call for an “Olympic truce” in Ukraine and elsewhere for the duration of the Paris games in late July and August. Good luck with that.

On the gathering menace of a trade war between the EU and China, no progress was made. As a minimal concession to his French hosts, Xi promised to drop threatened dumping duties on French Cognac and Armagnac sales to China.

Otherwise, Xi said that he could not see a problem. Cheap Chinese-built electric cars and solar panels and steel are swamping the EU market? All the better for the European fight against inflation and global warming.

READ MORE: How ‘Battery Valley’ is changing northern France

Maybe more will be achieved in shirt-sleeves in the Pyrenees today. The Chinese leadership is said to approve of Macron or at least believe that he is useful to them.

Beijing likes the French President’s arguments, renewed in a speech last month, that the EU should become a “strategic” commercial and military power in its own right and not a “vassal” of the United States. The Chinese leadership evidently has no fear of the EU becoming a rival power. It sees Macron’s ideas for a “Europe puissance” as a useful way of dividing the West and weakening the strength of Washington, the dollar and “western values”.

Macron has sometimes encouraged this way of thinking, perhaps accidentally. After his state visit to China last year, he gave a rambling media interview in which he seemed to say that the EU had no interest in being “followers of the US” or defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. He had to amend his words later.

That was Macron at his worst, an ad-lib, stand-up diplomat who ignores advice from the professionals in the Quai d’Orsay. I would argue, however, that the wider Macron argument – the EU must become more powerful or die – is the French President at his best.

Few other politicians in the world think ahead so much as Macron does. Democratic politics is mired in short-termism. Only autocrats like Xi or Putin can afford to think in terms of decades or centuries.

Macron likes to look around corners. He is often a better thinker than he is a diplomat or practical, daily politician.

His core argument – made in his Sorbonne speech last month and an interview with The Economist – is that Europe faces an unprecedented triple threat to its values, its security and its future prosperity.  

The rise of intolerant populist-nationalism threatens the values and institutions implanted in Europe after World War Two. The aggression of Russia and the detachment of the US (not just Donald Trump) threatens Europe’s security. The abandonment of global rules on fair trade – by Joe Biden’s US as well as Xi’s China – threatens to destroy European industry and sources of prosperity.

READ MORE: OPINION – Macron must earn the role of ’21st-century Churchill’

Civilisations, like people, are mortal, Macron says. Unless the EU and the wider democratic Europe (yes, you post-Brexit Britain) address these problems there is a danger that European civilisation (not just the EU experiment) could die.

Exaggerated? Maybe. But the problems are all real. Macron’s solutions are a powerful European defence alliance within Nato and targeted European protectionism and investment for the industries of the future.

The chances of those things being agreed by in time to make a difference are non-existent to small. In France, as elsewhere, these big “strategic” questions scarcely figure in popular concerns in the European election campaign.

Emmanuel Macron has now been president for seven years. His remaining three years in office will be something between disjointed and paralysed.

It is too early to write his political obituary but the Xi visit and the Sorbonne speech offer the likely main components. Macron will, I fear, be remembered as a visionary thinker and flawed diplomat/politician.

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