Macron will face Le Pen in the French presidential election final round

Marine Le Pen has finished second in the first round of voting in the French presidential election and will go through to the second and final round of voting on 7th May to fight head to head with Emmanuel Macron.

With 96% of the votes counted Macron leads with 23.91% of the vote with Le Pen in second place with 21.42% of the vote. François Fillon is in third place with 19.94% of the vote and far left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in fourth place with 19.54%.

Opinion polling suggested that it might be a run-off between Le Pen and Mélenchon but the far left vote failed to hold up.

Macron's lead has widened as the last results have been trickling in but it will come down to the wire in the main event next month. Le Pen is likely to pick up a big chunk of Mélechon's eurosceptic and working class vote whilst Macron can expect to hoover up Fillon's conservative vote. The odds are stacked against Le Pen but even if she loses on 7th May today's result will send shockwaves through the pro-EU, pro-mass immigration political class in France and across the EU.

There is a Trump's toupee breadth between UKIP and the Front National

Marine Le Pen has claimed that there is "not a hair's breadth" between the Front National and UKIP. She's right: it's more of a Trump's toupee between the two.

Le Pen has made a lot of progress in bringing her party into the mainstream and expelling members with more extreme views - including her father - but there is still some way to go before the Front National and UKIP could be considered that similar.

First Trump and now Le Pen - it looks like all the outsiders are going to be channelling Farage in the hope of electoral success!

Tactical withdrawal by French socialists leads to defeat Front National

The French Front National have failed to take control of any regions in last week's elections after an unprecedented pact between the socialists and conservatives which saw candidates stood down to help keep Marine Le Pen's party out of power.

Last week's regional elections had overtones of recent elections this side of the channel where left and right have united to stop UKIP from challenging the status quo. The big difference here, of course, is that UKIP isn't a racist party.  But despite the efforts of Marine Le Pen to make her father's party more moderate since she took the helm, it's still some way from being transformed into the kind of moderate party that can gain enough mainstream support to win elections.

The decision by the Socialists to withdraw candidates from the second round of voting to help the conservative Republicans is controversial and undermines the democratic process. Voters marked their preferences knowing how the votes should be split between the Socialists, Republicans and Front National. So-called tactical voting belongs in the ballot box, it is wrong for parties involved in the election to manipulate the result with tactical withdrawals.

If Le Pen continues to reform her party between now and the next election, it is hard to see how they can fail to capitalise on the 6.8m votes it received this time round.