Centrist independent candidate Emmanuel Macron beat on Sunday with comfortable margin the far-right rival Marine Le Pen to become France’s new president, according to exit polls.<\/p>\n
The polls placed Macron first with 62.46 percent ahead of Le Pen who got 37.54 percent of the votes in the run-off round. The initial percentages can change slightly as the rest of the votes are counted.<\/p>\n
The far-right leader has conceded defeat and said her National Front party has become the country’s leading opposition party, pledging a \u201cprofound reform\u201d of her party to create “a new political force”.<\/p>\nError, group does not exist! Check your syntax! (ID: 9)<\/span>\n Macron, a former economy minister, who has never before run for elected office, is ardently pro-EU and has praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for taking in over a million refugees.<\/p>\n Macron, a former investment banker, was top adviser on economic issues of outgoing president Francois Hollande from 2012 to 2014, then economy minister in his Socialist government for two years.<\/p>\n He later founded his own political movement ‘En Marche!’ (On the move) in April last year.<\/p>\n The U.S. President Donald Trump was one of the first world leaders to congratulate \u201cMacron on his big win.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI look very much forward to working with him!\u201d Trump posted on social media.<\/p>\n British Prime Minister Theresa May also congratulated Macron on his election success. \u201cFrance is one of our closest allies and we look forward to working with the new president on a wide range of shared priorities,\u201d she said in a statement.<\/p>\n Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni also took social media to hail Macron: \u201cLong live #Macron President! There is hope for Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n German Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s spokesman Steffen Seibert also congratulated Macron.<\/p>\n \u201cYour victory is a victory for a strong united Europe and for German-French friendship,\u201d Seibert posted on social media.<\/p>\nError, group does not exist! Check your syntax! (ID: 10)<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Centrist independent candidate Emmanuel Macron becomes France’s new president according to exit polls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":58817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,118,101,14],"tags":[77586,960,22757],"class_list":["post-58816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-hot","category-politics","category-world","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-france","tag-marine-le-pen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58816\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Leaders respond to Macron\u2019s victory<\/h3>\n