and well-known outside of france inside france he s remarkable for how divisive he s proven over the course of the last five years, changing the political landscape, coming from nowhere to bring in a new kind of centrist policy in france. a lot of people didn t like his style. a lot of people didn t like his policies. that was expressed in the first round of voting. last couple weeks we ve heard of a president who tends to speak his mind reaching out to that part of the electorate that either voted against him or chose not to vote at all. it s one of the lowest participation rates we ve had in decades in france. he ll try to reach out to them tonight. and, of course, looking ahead to next month, legislative elections, he knows he has so much more support he needs to get if he wants to be able to govern effectively. all right. melissa bell. low turnout across the country, but certainly very excited from where you are, macron head quarters. all right. we re going to continue to monit
as one of the important political power players at the eu. so this will restore him to that position, give some momentum back to the european union, particularly dealing with russia over the war in ukraine. i think at the moment looking at these figures, the perhaps best way to analyze them is it is sort of back to business as usual in france. but that said, there is a huge amount of the population that are really feeling disaffected by electoral politics in france, and that s really represented in the relatively high ab tension rate over 28% at the moment. at the same time, despite this projected win, does le pen still promise to be a political force, someone macron will still have to deal with, appeal to her followers? he will have to deal with the
double victory there, if you will. in the context of france, it was tough, the turnout wasn t particularly high. there was quite a high absent rate. many people didn t feel like they had much of a choice between other candidate. not people they would necessarily pick. the socialists scored highly in the first rount, but not enough to make the final cut for the final e election today. there were a lot of people on the left wing, if you will, of french politics who didn t feel there was a candidate for them, but many of them seem to sort of have held their political noses. they didn t want a populist right winger so they voted for macron, and here in brufls, it would be a huge sigh of relief. le pen would have been divisive here and gummed up the workings of the european union. macron has established himself
putin. it didn t have any effect. macron really became disaffected by it. and putin at the moment, you know, widely sort of seen as not being particularly interested in trying to find a peace deal at the moment. macron once he begun to see, as he began to get into the election campaign in france and began to realize how tight the race was dropped out of visibility completely from the diplomatic scene dealing with russia and ukraine. so he s very likely to reengage there, but what kind of a difference he can make right now isn t clear. he was very afraid of losing political capital at home by too close of association with president putin. he can reengage there now knowing that he s won the vote. that there s sort of no immediate political danger for him on that account. but the reality is can he shift the dow with putin, and i think that the take away at the moment would be no, putin is on a set track and is not listening to
sometimes happens up here will derail progress. just on occasion. eva, thanks so much. and we re continuing to monitor breaking news. french president macron now projected to win his second five-year term. analysis of early results show him defeating his far right challenger le pen. cnn has correspondents at both campaign head quarters. let s start with cnn s jim bitterman at le pen head quarters where le pen concedes but says her result was victory. explain why she said that. reporter: well, because she doesn t believe this is a defeat. i don t think her party members do either. they ve done better than they ve ever done in the past, and they ve gotten the score up increasingly one election after another. they see this as kind of a victory. what they re going to do, macron may have won the battle but not the war. what they re really going to do is move onto the legislative e