Just before the first round election a few weeks, polls showed that Macron and Le Pen would be in a dead heat in a runoff.
Instead, he ran away with a landslide, besting her by more than 16 points.
Her showing of 42% is much better than her 33% in 2017 and her father Jean-Marie Le Pen's 17% in 2002, but it's worth remembering that, at least publicly, Marine Le Pen is not only much more moderate than her explicitly racist father (a Holocaust denier), but she has moderated her positions even further over the past five years and particularly in the past couple months after Putin invaded Ukraine. (Had she won, would she have cast her new positions aside once in power? I don't know.)
Here's an
interesting look at how the French election has been covered in the
New York Times. In short, they fell into the same pattern for which I have regularly criticized U.S. mainstream media coverage of American politics: lots more coverage of Le Pen than of Macron, and most of the coverage of Macron was negative.
