PARIS, April 10 (Reuters) - France's incumbent leader Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Marine Le Pen are heading for an April 24 presidential election runoff, projections showed after first round voting on Sunday.
Battle lines drawn between globalist and euroscepticMacron garnered 28.1-29.5% of votes in the first round while Le Pen won 23.3-24.4%, according to separate estimates by pollsters Ifop, OpinionWay, Elabe and Ipsos. Those estimates, published as voting ended, are usually very reliable in France.
Conservative candidate Valerie Pecresse, the Socialists’ Anne Hidalgo, the Greens’ Yannick Jadot and the Communists’ Fabien Roussel said they would back Macron to block the far-right. But he paid a price for late entry into the campaign during which he eschewed market walkabouts in provincial France in favour of a single big rally outside Paris. A plan to make people work longer also proved unpopular, enabling Le Pen to narrow the gap in opinion polls.
After a more than 10 point lead Macron had enjoyed as late as mid-March, voter surveys ahead of the first round showed his margin of victory in an eventual runoff whittled down to within the margin of error. France, the EU’s second largest economy, would lurch from being a driving force for European integration to being led by a euro-sceptic who is also suspicious of the NATO military alliance.
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