The first French president to be re-elected in 20 years faces challenge in uniting nation deeply divided along economic, generational lines

French President Emmanuel Macron was re-elected Sunday, according to projections based on early ballot counts, overcoming deep divisions among voters worried about inflation and the impact of immigration on France’s national identity.
Mr. Macron garnered 58.2% of the estimated vote Sunday, while far-right leader Marine Le Pen won 41.8%, according to a projection from polling firm Ipsos.
Mr. Macron, 44 years old, becomes the first French president to secure a second term in office since 2002, when then-President Jacques Chirac beat Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in a 64-point landslide. Since then, however, the country has fractured along economic, generational and geographical lines, with wealthier urban voters gravitating toward Mr. Macron and younger, working-class voters in France’s rural areas backing Ms. Le Pen.

Mr. Macron is now under pressure to unite millions of French who cast ballots for his rivals in the election’s first-round of voting, when more than 50% of the vote went to candidates on the far right and far left. At stake is Mr. Macron’s drive to consolidate years of pro-business overhauls to the French economy—from tax cuts to his loosening of rules on hiring and firing employees—that have fueled discontent among voters who haven’t prospered under his administration.

At the top of Mr. Macron’s agenda is his plan to streamline France’s complex pension system and raise the country’s retirement age to 65 from 62. Mr. Macron says the move is necessary to fund lower taxes and boost government spending on the country’s vaunted public-health system, which was severely stretched during the pandemic. Ms. Le Pen and other opponents say Mr. Macron’s push to make people work longer is unbearable for working-class French who started working much earlier in life.

Mr. Macron is expected to swiftly form a government whose composition will provide voters with the first indication of whether he intends to stick with his self-proclaimed “Jupetarian” style of governance, which has at times involved lecturing the public on his overhauls and marginalizing the role of the National Assembly in lawmaking.

A heavy-handed approach won’t work in Mr. Macron’s second term, some analysts say, as he is likely to find it much harder to secure the commanding majority his party, La République en Marche, and its allies enjoyed during his first term. Mr. Macron is expected to select ministers from outside his party who can help bridge the political divide.

“Macron will need to lead a policy of social reconciliation,” said Pascal Perrineau, a political-science professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, commonly known as Sciences Po.
During his campaign, Mr. Macron said he would build consensus through a series of nationwide debates on the country’s school system, hospitals and democratic institutions. He also said he would work more closely with local officials to improve public services across the country, including in rural areas.
Sunday marked Ms. Le Pen’s second consecutive defeat in presidential elections since her father, who was convicted of anti-Semitism, handed leadership of the National Front to her a decade ago. In 2017, she lost to Mr. Macron by 32 percentage points after calling for France to leave the euro, a stance that spooked many French households.

Ms. Le Pen dropped her opposition to the euro and focused on pocketbook issues, framing her 2022 campaign as a fight against inflation. She also zeroed in on the impact the war in Ukraine was having on France’s economy, particularly the higher fuel prices that affect working-class commuters.
Ms. Le Pen rebranded her party as National Rally in an effort to turn the page on its far-right history, a strategy the party calls “de-demonization.” She toned down her rhetoric and opened up about her personal life, musing on her love of cats.
Still, Ms. Le Pen stuck with a political program that seized on the anxieties many voters outside France’s largest cities feel about Islam’s place in French society. France has been targeted with terrorist attacks by assailants who cited cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in French media as their motive.

Ms. Le Pen campaigned on rewriting France’s constitution to give “national preference” to French citizens over immigrants—including documented ones—in seeking jobs, public housing and welfare benefits. She also proposed a ban on the Muslim head scarf in all public places, describing the garb as an instrument of Islamist ideology.
Mr. Macron zeroed in on such proposals in the final stretch of the election, accusing Ms. Le Pen in a national debate of seeking to foment a civil war in a country that has one of Europe’s largest Muslim minorities. To some voters, however, Ms. Le Pen is no longer the bête noire of French politics.
“I have nothing against Marine Le Pen, even if I wear a head scarf,” said Lilia Missoum, a mother of four children in the port of Le Havre, along the English Channel. She cast her vote for Mr. Macron because she approved of his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, including the subsidized paychecks her husband received during the crisis. Still, she says, Mr. Macron’s “door to immigration is too open.”
Parliamentary elections in June will represent a test for both Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen. In 2017, candidates across the country for Mr. Macron’s then-nascent party rode his coattails, securing a majority.
People who voted for Mr. Macron on Sunday only out of opposition to Ms. Le Pen, however, will be hard pressed to back his party in June, when other parties will have candidates on the ballot. Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally meanwhile has a history of struggling to win parliamentary seats.
Her party secured only seven seats in the last parliamentary election, because opposing candidates in districts where National Rally has a strong following tend to drop out of the race, allowing more mainstream voters to coalesce around a single establishment candidate.
Both Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen will face stiff competition from the party of far-left agitator Jean-Luc Melenchon, who nearly qualified for the presidential runoff after garnering 22% of the first-round vote on April 10. Establishment parties that fared poorly in the presidential election also are expected to field candidates across the country where their roots run deep.

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