If borne out by official results, the two will advance to a presidential runoff on April 24 with strong echoes of their last face-off in the 2017 election. The projections show Macron with a comfortable first-round lead Sunday of between 27%-to-29% support, ahead of Le Pen, who is expected to capture 23%-to-24% of the vote.
In the 27-member EU, only France has a nuclear arsenal and a U.N. Security Council veto. As Russian President Vladimir Putin keeps up his military's assault on Ukraine, French power is helping to shape the European response. Macron is the only leading French presidential candidate who fully supports the NATO military alliance.
France operates a low-tech voting system, unchanged for generations, with paper ballots cast in person and hand-counted. Among the big unknowns was whether hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon — one of half a dozen candidates on the left — would upset the expected scenario of a Macron against Le Pen runoff. Polls suggested Melenchon might fall short, coming in third place.
In 2017, Macron trounced Le Pen by a landslide to become France's youngest modern president. That win for the former banker — now 44 — was seen as a victory against populist, nationalist politics, coming in the wake of Donald Trump's election to the White House and Britain's vote to leave the European Union, both in 2016.
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