THE pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron won the French presidency in a decisive victory Sunday over the far-right National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, and vowed to unite a divided and fractured France.

Macron, 39, a former economy minister who ran as a “neither left nor right” independent promising to shake up the French political system, took 66 percent to Le Pen’s 34 percent.

In a congratulatory message to Macron yesterday, Chinese President Xi Jinping said France was the first major Western country to have established diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China. Both as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and big countries with significant international influence, China and France bear special important responsibilities to world peace and development.

Addressing thousands of supporters in the grand courtyard of the Louvre, Macron said he would defend France and Europe. He said Europe and the world are “watching us” and “waiting for us to defend the spirit of the Enlightenment, threatened in so many places.”

He promised to unite a divided and fractured France, saying: “I will do everything to make sure you never have reason again to vote for extremes.”

Speaking of his meteoric rise and victory that was not forecast even a year ago, he said: “Everyone said it was impossible. But they didn’t know France!”

Turnout was the lowest in more than 40 years. Almost one-third of voters chose neither Macron nor Le Pen, with 12 million abstaining and 4.2 million spoiling ballot papers.

Macron, who has never held elected office and was unknown until three years ago, is France’s youngest president.

On Sunday, he will take over a country under a state of emergency, still facing a major terrorism threat and struggling with a stagnant economy after decades of mass unemployment.

Le Pen swiftly conceded defeat. She said she had won a “historic and massive” score that made her leader of “the biggest opposition force” in France and vowed to radically overhaul her National Front party.

Macron, a former investment banker and senior civil servant who grew up in a bourgeois family in Amiens, served as deputy chief of staff to Francois Hollande but was not part of the Socialist party.

In 2014, Hollande appointed him economy minister but he left government in 2016, complaining that pro-business reforms were not going far enough. A year ago he formed En Marche!, promising to shake up France’s “vacuous” and discredited political class.(SD-Agencies)

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