The legions of unelected and expensive EU bureaucrats will be relieved. Opinion polls predicted a Macron victory over Le Pen by around 60% to 40% and that was pretty much assured when the third place getter in the first round, conservative Francois Fillon endorsed Macron.
The Macron team even got Barack Obama to record a TV endorsement of him (subtitled).
But will the 39-year-old inexperienced Macron do anything to improve the French economy? No. The country's unemployment rate of 10% isn't as bad as the 18% in neighbouring Spain, but is a lot worse than the 4% in Germany on the other side (it's unlikely that many of Merkel's 2 million+ recent Muslim migrants are in that figure, though). And it's unlikely Macron will do anything to stop the flood of north Africans coming into the country, which will only worsen the already high levels of resentment among the working class and small town inhabitants fed up with their attitudes.
Still the FN should be happy: Marine Le Pen's 36% of the vote firmly establishes it as a mainstream force and opposition to the prevailing approaches of the government. Like the UK, France is having elections to the National Assembly next month and it will be interesting to see how many seats the FN wins.
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