“Even if he wins 60 percent of the vote, that does not mean<br />that 60 percent of the French have voted for Emmanuel Macron,” said Alexis Massart, director of the European School of Political and Social Science at the University of Lille.<br />A big question now is where those voters will turn — to the center with Mr. Macron or farther to the right with Ms.<br />Also in play are the 19 percent of voters who went in the first round with the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.<br />She said she planned on abstaining because she did not want to choose between “a racist party and a banker party.”<br />No matter who wins, the country will be abandoning a political order<br />that has shaped it for the last 59 years, when it was dominated by the country’s two mainstream parties — the Socialist Party and the center-right Republicans.<br />Even before the last-minute attempt at sabotage, the election represented a big step into the political unknown for France — the first time in more than 50 years<br />that neither of the establishment parties will be represented in the final round.
