Independent centrist Emmanuel Macron will be the 25th president of France having beaten the far-right National Party’s Marine Le Pen in the final round of the election on Sunday evening, according to exit polls.
Le Pen conceded defeat in a telephone call shortly after 8 p.m. local time, according to an aide to the defeated candidate.
Macron secured 65.5 percent of the vote versus the 34.5 percent won by Le Pen, according to initial projections from both IFOP and Kantar-Sofres. A similar projection published by Harris Interactive gave Macron 66.1 percent of the vote versus 33.9 percent for Le Pen.
Voter turnout was recorded at 65.30 percent as of 5:00 p.m. local time, according to an official statement from the Interior Ministry.
That figure compares to 71.96 percent at the same time during the last election in 2012 and 75.11 percent in 2007.
At 39-years old, Macron is set to be the youngest ever French president with his victory being interpreted as a boost for European cooperation, a concept of which he is a fervent advocate.
Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Trogneux
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He is expected to push for a harder line on behalf of the European Union as the U.K. negotiates its exit from the trading bloc. On the other hand, while on the campaign trail, losing candidate Le Pen had advocated abandoning the euro currency used within the EU as well as closing the Union’s open borders.
A spokesperson for Macron’s En Marche movement claimed on Friday to have been aggressively hit by a “massive and co-ordinated” anonymous hacking operation which had resulted in 9 gigabytes’ worth of emails and financial data being posted online to a document sharing site called Pastebin.
This came at the tail end of a dramatic campaigning period that has seen a series of scandals, demonstrations and vicious rhetoric shake news and markets.
France has a population of around 64.89 million people, according to the latest estimates from the United Nations, with approximately 47 million eligible to vote in Sunday’s election.
