Polling is under way across mainland France for the first round of a fiercely contested presidential election.
Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen are the frontrunners among the 12 candidates to win through to the second round in two weeks but opinion polls have suggested the race will be close.
At midday local time, the official number of those who had voted was declared as 25.48%, a 3-point drop from the presidential election of 2017.
In recent weeks the radical left’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon has closed the gap with the two frontrunners, and pollsters say the level of abstention is likely to play a major role in the eventual result. Some analysts have suggested up to a third of voters could shun the ballot, the highest number in 20 years.
Macron voted near his home in the northern French seaside town of Le Touquet. The president and his wife Brigitte left their home shortly after midday and greeted the crowds waiting outside in the sunshine. Several youngsters posed for selfies with the Macrons, who spent more than ten minutes shaking hands with those in the crowd and kissing babies.
Among the first to turn out to vote was the former conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy, followed shortly afterwards by the Socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, who was the first candidate to cast her ballot, at about 8.30am at a polling station near her home in Paris’s 15th arrondissement.
The prime minister, Jean Castex, voted shortly afterwards in Pyrénées-Orientales, followed by the former Socialist president François Hollande in Corrèze. Hollande, who led France between 2012 and 2017, was accompanied by his partner, the actor Julie Gayet.
Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) queued up with a crowd of locals waiting to vote at an infants’ school in Marseille, where he has been the local MP since 2017. The mainstream right candidate Valérie Pécresse voted shortly afterwards in her local polling station in Yvelines, west of Paris. Fabien Roussel, the presidential candidate for the Communist party, voted in the north of France. Nathalie Arthaud, of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), who is standing in her third presidential election, also voted on Sunday morning.
Le Pen turned up at a polling station in the northern French town of Hénin-Beaumont, where she scored 46.5% of the vote in the first round of the 2017 presidential election. Le Pen, who is favourite to be in the second round vote, was greeted by a crowd outside and posed for photographs before voting.
The radical rightwing candidate Éric Zemmour and the Ecology candidate, Yannick Jadot, voted in different places in Paris. Another of the 12 candidates, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan of the rightwing Debout la France (Stand Up France) party, also on his third presidential campaign, voted in the Essonne department, south of Paris.
About 48.7 million people are eligible to vote in the presidential contest. The winner will lead the European Union’s second-largest economy and the EU’s only nuclear power. Time differences mean voting began in France’s overseas territories at midday Paris time on Saturday. In French Polynesia the number of voters who had turned out was estimated at 12.34%, compared with 22.24% at the same time in the last presidential election in 2017.
The main issues in this election have been the cost of living with voters angry about rising fuel and food prices, caused mainly by the war in Ukraine. Health, employment and environmental concerns have also featured in candidates’ manifestos. Immigration has been pushed as a major concern by the far-right Le Pen and her rival on that side of politics, the former journalist and television pundit Zemmour who has seen his support collapse in recent weeks.
In the run-up to Sunday’s vote result there had been a period of “electoral silence” during which candidates were prevented from campaigning and no opinion polls could be published to avoid voters being influenced in the hours before the ballot.
The first indication of which two candidates will be in the runoff will be announced at 8pm French time – when polling stations in the major cities close – based on partial counts from a certain number of polling stations in towns and cities selected as a representative mix of France. No results are expected before then, and under France’s election rules no estimates are allowed before then, except for the rate of abstention. The campaign starts again at 8pm on Sunday and will then continue for another two weeks until the second-round vote.
Frédéric Dabi, director of the opinion pollsters Ifop, told Le Monde: “We’ve a strange campaign that’s been unlike other presidential elections.” The war in Ukraine, a “lack of interest” and the absence of the usual national debate that sees candidates argue their projects had left many voters uninterested, he said.
Macron, who has remained favourite to win the first round, entered the race late and his campaign was derailed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He held just one national meeting earlier this month. Le Pen ended the week just a few percentage points behind him.
Political analysts have warned the predicted Macron-Le Pen duel for the second round could be overturned if abstention is high. The polling company Harris Interactive suggested 70% of French voters considered the presidential campaign “disappointing”. About 20% of voters who said they had decided who they would vote for admitted they could change their mind, adding to the uncertainty.
Masks are no longer required in France except on public transport, but voters have been advised to wear a face covering if their polling station is particularly busy.
