In the recent presidential election in France, no candidate captured a majority vote in the April 23 first round, forcing a runoff on May 7 between Emmanuel Macron of the "En Marche!" movement, who won 24.01 percent of the ballot and Marine Le Pen of the National Front with 21.30 percent. Francois Fillon, a Republican who had initially been viewed as a favorite, narrowly lost out with 20.01 percent of the votes. The then-governing Socialist Party suffered a major loss as its candidate, Benoit Hamon, gained only 6.36 percent of the votes. In a stark contrast, Jean-Luc Melenchon of the ultra-leftist France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party won support from 19.58 percent of voters. Presumably, many of the Socialist supporters switched allegiance to either middle-of-the-road Macron and radical-left Melenchon.
This year's election was characterized by big gains made by both the ultra-rightists and the ultra-leftists, and sharp losses sustained by established major parties. In the runoff, Macron scored a resounding victory by winning 66.1 percent of the votes against Le Pen's 33.9 percent. A majority of those who had supported the Republicans and Socialists are believed to have detested the extreme right and voted for the centrist Macron as they endorsed his call for France to remain in the European Union. It was speculated before the second round that many of those who had voted for Melenchon would side with Le Pen as both shared the common ground of opposing the EU membership and the established parties, but the results suggest that a bulk of Melenchon supporters either abstained or cast blank votes.
It is not just in France that the conventional two-party system, in which a conservative party and a liberal (or social democratic) force compete for power, is collapsing. In the Republican primaries in last year's presidential race in the United States, Donald Trump won an upset victory despite his anti-immigration, anti-free trade and anti-Muslim agenda, which were diametrically opposed to the Republican Party's basic principles of conservatism and market fundamentalism.