French President Emmanuel Macron improved on his 2017 score in Sunday’s first round of the presidential election. But he goes into the April 24 run-off with a starkly diminished reservoir of votes in what large swaths of the country have come to see as a choice of “the lesser of two evils”.
Macron trounced the same far-right candidate in a lopsided contest five years ago, but polls are pointing to a much closer race this time amid widespread dismay at a rematch voters have long said they didn’t want.
