Emmanuel Macron Downs Far Right Extremist Le Pen!

Emmanuel Macron has a five more years.

The European Union and the United States can breathe a sigh of relief, French president Emmanuel Macron defeated the far right extremist Marie Le Pen.

Le Pen was trying to tone down her rhetoric and focus on Macron's failures in the economy and rising inflation. Many French citizens feel the pain like many here in the states.

Rising fuel costs, Ukraine, tensions with European Union and immigration have been some of the issues facing France. The Le Pen campaign wanted to champion on the same type of crap the Republican exploit every election. The culture wars, revisionism and scapegoating are typical themes of far right extremists.

Trust me, Marie Le Pen is a French version of Washed Up 45 and Vladimir Putin.

The centrist incumbent is projected to receive between 57 and 58.5 percent of the vote in Sunday's second-round runoff, versus 41.5 to 43 percent for Le Pen, his nationalist rival.

If accurate, Macron will win decisively though by a smaller margin than in 2017, when he won by more than 30 percentage points to became France's youngest president. While falling short of the Élysée Palace again, in her third presidential run, Le Pen still looks set to secure the most votes ever for a French far-right candidate.

Le Pen’s challenge to the country’s mainstream order and the West’s unity against Russia had officials in Europe and Washington anxiously following the election amid the war in Ukraine.

She conceded defeat in a speech to supporters shortly after the projections were released, but said her unprecedented vote total represented “a shining victory in itself.”

“The ideas we represent are reaching summits,” she said.

After polls closed across France at 8 p.m. local time (2 p.m. ET), polling companies Opinionway, Harris and Ifop worked with media organizations to publish projected results based on early voting patterns. This method has accurately predicted French elections in the past.

The final result will be announced by the country's interior ministry on Monday.

Opinion polls put Macron about 10 points ahead in the campaign's final days — too close for comfort for a leader who consistently urged voters not to be complacent in the face of Le Pen's far-right threat.

The campaign was beset by apathy, with many voters dissatisfied with either candidate. They were both pinning their hopes on attracting some of the 7.7 million voters who initially backed the firebrand socialist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who came third in the first round of the election on April 10.

With just three hours before the last voting stations closed, turnout was 63 percent — down two points compared with the same time five years ago.

But ultimately Macron, 44, looks to have won a clear victory that surpassed his polling numbers, surging in the final stages to earn five more years at the helm of the European power.

Go somewhere Marie Le Pen. She is now the perennial loser.

He will become the first president since Jacques Chirac two decades ago to secure a second term in office, but must now confront domestic dissatisfaction as well as the effects of both the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing war on the continent.

He must also battle to keep his parliamentary majority in legislative elections in June.

Le Pen’s performance in this election shows how much France has changed politically, with mainstream center-left and center-right parties obliterated in the first round.

In 2002, Chirac won a landslide 82 percent victory over Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, in a swell of opposition to his hardline anti-immigration stance.

In recent years she has sought to soften her image and distance her party from her family’s often toxic political legacy and association with Holocaust denial.