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      Your Monday Briefing: Macron Wins Re-election

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      Plus an announced visit by top U.S. officials to Kyiv, while New Zealand and Japan announce closer diplomatic ties.Good morning. We’re covering President Emmanuel Macron’s victory in France, an announced visit by top U.S. officials to Kyiv and a power re-calibration in the Pacific.French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron celebrate after his victory in France’s presidential election.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMacron wins re-election in FrancePresident Emmanuel Macron of France has won a second term, defeating the far-right leader Marine Le Pen in a close competition and becoming the first French president to be re-elected in 20 years.Early projections showed Macron, a centrist, gaining 58.5 percent of the vote to Le Pen’s 41.5 percent. His victory was much narrower than in 2017, when the margin was 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent for Le Pen, but wider than appeared likely two weeks ago.The contest hinged on economic issues, and Macron, distracted by his fruitless Russia diplomacy, seldom showed real concern for the financial difficulties many French have faced during the pandemic and the war.But his promise of stability and his effective stewardship over the Covid-19 crisis appear to have prevailed over the strong temptation of an extremist lurch toward nationalism.Analysis: Le Pen, the leader of an anti-immigrant movement, tried to focus on economic policy in an effort to sanitize her image without softening her xenophobic program, and brought the extreme right closer to power than at any time since 1944.Russia: The election has profound effects on the war in Ukraine. Le Pen, who owes millions to a Russian bank, is a longtime Moscow ally and heads a party hostile to NATO. European officials immediately expressed their relief after Macron’s victory.Ukrainian soldiers paused for Orthodox Easter services on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine. David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesMariupol holds, commander saysUkrainian forces are still in full control of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol and have repelled continuous assaults by Russian infantry, a commander told The Times on Sunday.He said his forces were willing to leave the factory and evacuate the city if given guarantees of safe passage for themselves and hundreds of civilians. Satellite images appear to show a growing mass grave on the city’s outskirts, and the mayor said that “at least 15,000 elderly and those with chronic diseases may die.”Diplomatic winds blew strong in Kyiv, as President Volodymyr Zelensky prepared to meet with the U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. Details of their trip had not yet been released.Fighting continues to rage in the country’s east. Russia, which has taken more than three dozen small towns in the region, ignored calls for a cease-fire during the Orthodox Easter holiday. Its missiles struck the port city of Odesa — which has been largely spared attacks on its civilians — killing at least eight people. But Ukrainian soldiers are still fighting fiercely. Follow live updates here.Context: Weapons are flowing into Ukraine from the West, and the U.S. has pledged more military aid, including drones that explode on impact. Zelensky said Ukraine had begun to receive the sort of heavy weaponry it needed, and he promised victory. Other updates:Germany’s former chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, has become a pariah because of his work for Russian-controlled energy companies.Warsaw is bursting with refugees.Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in Tokyo on Thursday.Pool photo by Yuichi YamazakiPower shifts in the Pacific regionAs China moves to expand its influence in the Asia-Pacific region, New Zealand and Japan have announced a goal of “seamless” sharing of classified information.In the announcement, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan spoke of “growing strategic challenges” in the Pacific. Two days earlier, the Solomon Islands said it had reached a security agreement with China, which provoked unease among Western-aligned powers in the region.Ardern and Kishida also highlighted their opposition to “unilateral actions that seek to alter the status quo by force” in the East and South China seas, most likely a reference to Beijing’s efforts to construct artificial islands for military use and encroach on disputed territories.Analysis: Tokyo has long tried to join the “Five Eyes” intelligence partnership, through which the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand share intelligence. Members were concerned about the security of the Japanese intelligence community, but the country has overhauled its methods.Background: New Zealand has itself faced questions about its reliability as an intelligence partner because it is so economically dependent on China, by far the largest purchaser of its exports.THE LATEST NEWSAsia and The PacificRescuers shielded a stretcher on Sunday.Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt least 10 people died after a Japanese tour boat sank off the coast of Hokkaido Island. Sixteen more are missing.An explosion at a Sufi mosque in northern Afghanistan killed at least 33 people on Friday, the latest in a series of bloody attacks reminiscent of the past two decades of war.South Korea’s departing president, Moon Jae-in, urged dialogue with the U.S. in a warm farewell letter to Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator. Kim replied in an exchange the North described as “an expression of their deep trust.”Prime Minister Narendra Modi focused on economic growth, rather than restive politics, when he dedicated a solar plant in northern India on Sunday.World NewsA landmark new law from the European Union would force internet service companies to combat misinformation and restrict certain online ads. Similar efforts in the U.S. have stalled.On Friday, more skirmishes flared up at the Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, a holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount.A judicial inquiry in South Africa found that corruption at its tax agency was because of “collusion” between Bain & Company and the country’s former president, Jacob Zuma.The world is falling far short of the goal to vaccinate 70 percent of every country’s population by June.A Morning ReadHo Kew Lee, 85, seated, is part of the older generation trying to find new leaders to keep civic organizations afloat.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesIn New York City, Chinatown’s civic groups have long used their coveted real estate portfolio to hold back encroaching gentrification. But the pandemic introduced new costs, which could force the graying owners to sell and dramatically upend the neighborhood’s delicate balance.ARTS AND IDEASCentral Park, Manhattan.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesOlmstead’s visionDetroit’s Belle Island. Boston’s Emerald Necklace. Stanford University. Central Park. And, of course, the U.S. Capitol.These iconic public spaces, and others, came from the vision of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, born 200 years ago on April 26. His creations are more essential to American life than ever, Audra D. S. Burch writes in The Times.Olmsted saw parks as an oasis, a haven for fresh air and safety. “The park should, as far as possible, complement the town,” he wrote. “Openness is the one thing you cannot get in buildings.” During the pandemic, Audra writes, “his parks helped sustain Americans’ mental and physical health and social connections.”Some of his parks also became the staging grounds for social justice protests. “Olmsted understood the promise of the park as a social force that would become an amenity in city life over the decades,” Audra writes. He saw parks as sites of healing, “literal common grounds forging communities, unstratified by race or class or faith.”“The young nation that Olmsted served might be unrecognizable to him today,” Audra continues, “except for the rituals preserved and encouraged by his own creations:Restoration and recreation.Wonder and discovery.Solitude and community.And sometimes, simply — sitting still.”I highly encourage you to take a trip through Olmstead’s creations, and view more of Ruth Fremson’s stunning photos, here.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookBobbi Lin for The New York TimesIce cream and a spring of tarragon round out these grape dumplings, a popular recipe among Indigenous nations of the American Southeast.What to WatchStream these five action movies, including an Indonesian fight flick interrogating toxic masculinity, a Punjabi family mob drama and a muscular South Korean gangland film.WellnessCan your diet help prevent dementia?Now Time to PlayPlay today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Head pests (four letters).Here are today’s Wordle and today’s Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. Eduardo Medina, a Times fellow, will join the Express desk as a general assignment reporter.The latest episode of “The Daily” is on the French election.You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com. More

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      Marine Le Pen’s Message Finds a Strong Audience in the North

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      HARDECOURT-AUX-BOIS, France — Marine Le Pen spent the last two days of her campaign in the deindustrialized, economically struggling areas in the north of France that, along with a Mediterranean stretch in the south, form her strongholds.Exhorting her core supporters to vote on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen held events in the Somme department, home to towns and villages where her attacks against her rival, Emmanuel Macron, as an “arrogant” president full of “disdain” for ordinary people resonated powerfully.“To me, Emmanuel Macron is a president who has made the rich richer,” said Gaëtan François, 40, a construction tractor operator and a village councilor, outside the City Hall in Hardecourt-aux-Bois. “Marine Le Pen is the only one to defend the workers.”In Hardecourt-aux-Bois, a village of 85 people in the Somme, only three people voted for Mr. Macron in the first round earlier this month. Ms. Le Pen got 78 percent of the votes, her highest score nationwide.The village, like the rest of the region, has drifted rightward in the past decade.Maurice Clément, 82, a retired truck driver, said he had voted for Socialists most of his life. In 2017, he voted for Ms. Le Pen in the first round, but for Mr. Macron in the runoff because he was worried about the extreme right.This time, he had no such worries. Mr. Macron’s policies, he said, had plunged France in a “hole,” citing the record government debt accumulated during his presidency. He was angry about Mr. Macron’s proposal to raise the retirement age to 65 from 62 as part of his plans to overhaul the pension system. For those who had done hard manual labor all their lives, retiring at 65 was the equivalent of retiring in “crutches,” he said.Ms. Le Pen, he said, “is the only choice.”About 24 miles away, Ham, a town of about 5,000 people, has also shifted rightward in recent years. In the 2012 presidential election, people in Ham voted like the rest of the nation by choosing François Hollande, the Socialist Party candidate, over the center-right Nicolas Sarkozy.But in 2017, Ham picked Ms. Le Pen over Mr. Macron. Ms. Le Pen won 56 percent of the votes in Ham, compared with only 34 percent nationwide.On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen was expected to handily defeat Mr. Macron in Ham once again. In the first round of voting two weeks ago, she had 41 percent of the votes, with Mr. Macron getting only 24 percent.Beyond Ms. Le Pen’s focus on the working class, her longstanding tough talk on crime and immigration appealed to voters like Hubert Bekaert, 68, a retired optician.“I’m sick of using taxpayer money to house terrorists in prison,” he said, adding that he wanted the death penalty restored. “Marine Le Pen is the only one who’s tough on crime.” More

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      The French presidential voting system is simple, but also complex.

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      Presidents in France are elected directly by the people for five-year terms, in a two-round system. This year, the first round was held on April 10, and the second round is being held on Sunday.A candidate who gets an absolute majority of votes in the first round is elected outright, an unlikely outcome that has never come to pass since the French started choosing presidents by direct popular vote in 1965.Instead, a runoff is usually held between the top two candidates. This year, it is a repeat of the most recent contest, in 2017, when Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen.The two-round system is simple but has complex implications for voters. They have to choose between a dozen or more candidates in the first round, and then, if their preferred candidate doesn’t make the runoff, between two candidates they might not like.One way to try to avoid that predicament is through “useful” voting. Instead of going with their top choice in the first round, voters might opt to go with their second or third if they believe that candidate has a better chance of getting into the runoff.That mechanism helped fuel a surge by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fiery politician who came in a strong third place two weeks ago, partly by attracting voters who thought he was the left-wing candidate best positioned to reach the runoff.One common saying is that people vote with their hearts in the first round and with their heads in the runoff; another is that in the first round, voters choose, while in the second, they eliminate.A prime example is the so-called Republican front, when voters cast differences aside to counter the far right. In 2017, many voters who disliked Mr. Macron and hadn’t voted for him in the first round picked him in the runoff, propelling him to a sweeping victory over Ms. Le Pen.But this year, nearly a third of the ballots went to the extreme right in the first round, and many left-wing voters felt betrayed by Mr. Macron’s rightward drift, so he may have a harder time repeating that feat.Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Macron have actively courted the 21.95 percent of voters who picked Mr. Mélenchon in the first round. But polls show that those voters are very split and uncertain about their runoff choice, making it hard to predict which candidate will benefit most. More

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      Orrin Hatch, Longtime Senator Who Championed Right-Wing Causes, Dies at 88

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      A Utah Republican, he overcame poverty to become a powerful force in Washington, helping to build a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican who crusaded for right-wing causes and outlasted six presidents in a seven-term Senate career that corresponded to the rise of the conservative movement in America, died on Saturday in Salt Lake City. He was 88.The Hatch Foundation confirmed his death in a statement. It did not specify a cause.Born into poverty in the Great Depression, one of nine children of a Pittsburgh metal worker, Mr. Hatch, who briefly aspired to the presidency and to a seat on the Supreme Court, had a grim Dickensian childhood. He went to school in bib overalls, lost siblings in infancy and in World War II, and grew up in a crowded, ramshackle house without indoor plumbing.In law school, he, his wife and children lived in a chicken coop that he and his father rebuilt behind his parents’ home.“We turned it into a tiny two-room bungalow, with a toilet and small stove, that we nicknamed ‘the cottage,’ a description that would have made even the most aggressive real estate agent cringe,” he said in a memoir, “Square Peg: Confessions of a Citizen Senator” (2002).But in the Senate, as in his early life, he was a fighter. Through shrewd political instincts and a fine-tuned sense of the national mood moving to the right, he became a powerful Washington political force, advising seven presidents, shaping some 12,000 pieces of legislation as a sponsor or co-sponsor, and helping to build and hold a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for years.In a 42-year tenure that began weeks before Jimmy Carter became president in 1977 and ended as his last term drew to a close in early 2019, Mr. Hatch was one of the Senate’s best-known leaders, as familiar to many Americans as anyone on Capitol Hill. He conferred at the White House with Presidents Carter, Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, and voted to confirm nine justices of the Supreme Court.He was the longest-serving Republican and the sixth longest-serving senator in the history of the Senate, a singular achievement made all the more remarkable by the fact that, aside from a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, it was the only office he had ever sought. He was elected to the Senate in 1976 on his first try and re-elected six times by overwhelming margins. To make an orderly parting transition, he had announced nearly a year in advance that he would not seek an eighth term.From January 2015, when the G.O.P. took control of the Senate, until his retirement, Mr. Hatch had been its president pro tempore — making him by law third in the line of succession to the presidency, after the vice president and the speaker of the House. It was just a whiff of presidential power, as those ambitions had long ago sputtered out.By his final term, polls indicated that Utah voters believed it was time for Mr. Hatch to go. The Salt Lake Tribune facetiously named him “Utahn of the Year” in December 2017, and in an accompanying editorial had scathingly characterized his leading role in passage of the Trump tax cuts, which favored the rich, as an “utter lack of integrity.” The editorial reminded him of a 2012 promise not to run again in 2018.Mr. Hatch’s departure notice, a courteous and politically astute move, was appreciated by many party colleagues because it cleared a way for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and a Mormon, to run for his seat.Mr. Romney was easily elected in 2018 and succeeded Mr. Hatch when he stepped down. Republicans saw Mr. Romney as a strong addition to the Senate; Democrats knew he was no friend of Mr. Trump, whom he had derided as a “fraud” and “phony” during the 2016 campaign.As the president pro tempore, Mr. Hatch was Mr. Trump’s designated successor during his Inaugural ceremonies — kept safe at an undisclosed location to ensure the government’s continuity, just in case. And in Mr. Trump’s first two years in office, he became one of the president’s most enthusiastic Senate loyalists, instrumental in achieving not only his tax cuts but the confirmation of his first two Supreme Court nominees, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. In 2018, Mr. Trump conferred the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, on Mr. Hatch.Throughout his Senate years, Mr. Hatch had been a gentlemanly, but relentless, conservative rock. He blocked labor law reforms and fair housing bills with filibusters, tying up Senate business for weeks. He voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have enshrined gender equality as a bedrock civil right, and he proposed a Constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal.In a chamber of party loyalties, Mr. Hatch was also fiercely independent and often unpredictable. A lifelong Mormon who had performed missionary work in his youth, he held hard-right views on gun control, capital punishment, immigration and balanced budgets. He also opposed same-sex marriage, although he endorsed civil unions and laws barring discrimination against gay and transgender people in housing and employment.While he helped craft the court’s majority, he was hard to gauge on nominees. He voted for the conservatives Antonin Scalia (1986), Clarence Thomas (1991), John G. Roberts Jr. (chief justice, 2005), Samuel Alito (2006), Mr. Gorsuch (2017) and Mr. Kavanaugh (2018), and against the liberals Sonia Sotomayor (2009) and Elena Kagan (2010). But he also voted for Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote (1988) and for two liberals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993) and Stephen Breyer (1994).When politically expedient, Mr. Hatch edged toward the center. In 1990, after labeling Democrats “the party of homosexuals,” the senator, amid talk that he might be interested in a Supreme Court seat himself, retracted the disparagement. “That was a dumb thing to say,” he acknowledged. “That’s their business and I’m not going to judge them by my standards of what I think is right.”Similarly, after his brief run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, he conceded the race to the eventual winner, George W. Bush, with centrist magnanimity. “I like the fact that he can reach across partisan lines,” Mr. Hatch said of Mr. Bush. “We can’t just take a narrow agenda and just narrowly be for a few people in this country. We’ve got to be for everybody.”For all his conservative credentials, Mr. Hatch had a longstanding and genuine friendship with Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the quintessential liberal Democrat. They spoke often and shared legislative accomplishments, including programs to assist AIDS patients, protect the disabled from discrimination and provide health insurance for the working poor. Mr. Hatch delivered a moving eulogy at Mr. Kennedy’s funeral in 2009.The New York Times in 1981 described Mr. Hatch as “an aggressive, ambitious man who, as much as anything, resembles a minister making his rounds.” He was, in fact, a bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Away from Capitol Hill, he led a quiet married life, the father of six children. He jogged, golfed and had an athlete’s trim look, even after his dark hair turned white.Senators, even Republicans, called him relatively humorless. His idea of a good joke, on himself, was a video that caught him trying to remove glasses he was not wearing during a contentious Senate hearing. It went viral online. A spokesman said he laughed at himself when he saw it, and created a fake Warby Parker page implying that invisible glasses were the new rage.Mr. Hatch had been an amateur boxer in his youth, with 11 bouts to his credit. He was also a pianist, a violinist and an organist, who wrote songs for pop groups and folk singers. In the early 1970s, he was the band manager for a Mormon-themed folk group, “Free Agency.” He also wrote books on politics and religion, and articles for periodicals and newspapers, including The Times.He was 42 years old, a tall, slim Salt Lake City lawyer, when he went to Washington in 1977 after defeating a three-term Democratic incumbent with the help of an endorsement — for “Warren Hatch” — from Ronald Reagan. The former California governor lost his bid for the Republican presidential nomination to President Gerald Ford, but would sweep into office with his conservative revolution in 1980, counting Mr. Hatch as an ally.As a Senate freshman, Mr. Hatch found mentors among its deepest conservatives — the Democrats James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Jim Allen of Alabama, and the Democrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. He did not, however, share their ardor for racial segregation.But he offered himself as a rising young protégé, and they taught him how to pass and block legislation, stage filibusters, build coalitions and horse-trade behind the scenes. In time, he became chairman of the Finance and Judiciary Committees, which wrote tax legislation and confirmed federal judges, and a power on committees that ruled the fate of health, education and labor bills.His actions were consistently conservative: opposing Mr. Carter’s social welfare programs, favoring Reagan and Bush tax and spending cuts and fighting Clinton health care ideas. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he helped draft the USA Patriot Act and supported Mr. Bush’s retributive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also opposed Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and backed Mr. Trump’s immigration initiatives and his withdrawal from the Paris accords on climate change.Mr. Hatch was occasionally criticized for potential conflicts of interest. He publicly defended the Bank of Credit and Commerce International before it was closed in 1991 in a massive fraud case, and later acknowledged that he had solicited a $10 million loan from the bank for a business associate.During the opioid crisis in 2015, he introduced a bill to narrow the authority of government regulators to halt the marketing of drugs by predatory pharmaceutical companies. It later emerged that he had received $2.3 million in donations from the drug industry over 25 years.But there were no political repercussions. The senator was re-elected in 1982, 1988, 1994, 2000, 2006 and 2012, averaging nearly 65 percent of the vote. Orrin Grant Hatch was born in Homestead Park, Pa., near Pittsburgh, on March 22, 1934, the sixth of nine children of Jesse and Helen (Kamm) Hatch. His parents were Mormons who had moved from Utah in the 1920s to find work. After losing their home in the Depression, Jesse borrowed $100 to buy a plot of land in the hills above Pittsburgh and built a house of blackened lumber salvaged from a fire.Two of Orrin’s siblings died in infancy. He was deeply affected by the loss of his brother, Jesse, a World War II Army Air Force nose gunner who was killed when his B-24 was shot down in a 1945 bombing raid over Europe.At Baldwin High School, Orrin was captain of the basketball team and president of the student body. He took two years off for missionary work, proselytizing in Ohio, and graduated in 1955. He then moved to Utah and worked as a union lathe operator to pay his way through Brigham Young University.In 1957, he married Elaine Hansen. They had six children: Brent, Marcia, Scott, Kimberly, Alysa and Jess. After earning a bachelor’s degree in history at BYU in 1959, he studied law at the University of Pittsburgh on a full scholarship and received his juris doctor in 1962. He joined a Pittsburgh law firm, but in 1969 moved to Salt Lake City to open his own practice. He represented private clients in tax, contract and personal injury cases, and corporations fighting federal regulations.Coming from a family of Roosevelt Democrats, Mr. Hatch gradually became a conservative Republican. Upset by many events, including the Supreme Court’s ban on public-school prayers and its legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade, he concluded that America was headed in the wrong direction.“I was convinced that someone needed to stand against these trends,” he said in his memoir. “Someone needed to point out the deterioration of our moral fiber, the proliferation and increasing acceptance of drugs and crime, the expansion of the welfare state.”That someone was he. More

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      Inside Le Pen Territory as France Votes in a Runoff Election

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      Whatever happens in the runoff election on Sunday, France has changed, and the winner may face a turbulent season.ST. RÉMY-SUR-AVRE, France — Eternal France, its villages gathered around church spires, its fields etched in a bright patchwork of green and rapeseed yellow, unfolds as if to offer reassurance in troubled times that some things do not change. But the presidential election on Sunday, an earthquake whatever its outcome, suggests otherwise.France has changed. It has eviscerated the center-left and center-right parties that were the chief vehicles of its postwar politics. It has split into three blocs: the hard left, an amorphous center gathered around President Emmanuel Macron, and the extreme right of Marine Le Pen.Above all, with Ms. Le Pen likely to get some 45 percent of the vote, it has buried a tenacious taboo. In a country that for four wartime years lived under the racist Nazi-puppet Vichy government, no xenophobic, nationalist leader would be allowed into the political mainstream, let alone be able to claim the highest office in the land.Unlikely to win, but well within the zone of a potential surprise, Ms. Le Pen has shattered all of that. She is no outlier. She is the new French normal. If Mr. Macron does edge to victory, as polls suggest, he will face a restive, fractured country, where hatred of him is not uncommon. The old nostrum that France is ungovernable may be tested again.In St. Rémy-sur-Avre, Ms. Le Pen took 37.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the election, pushing Mr. Macron into a distant second with 23.6 percent.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesSt. Rémy-sur-Avre, a small town of some 4,000 inhabitants about 60 miles west of Paris, is Le Pen territory. In the Maryland cafe, named for a cigarette brand that is no more, the prevailing view is that something has to give in a France that has lost its way under a president too privileged and remote to know anything of the burden of struggle.Customers buy lottery tickets, or bet on the harness racing on television, in the hope of unlikely relief from hardship. A kir, white wine with a little black current liqueur, is a popular morning drink. The streets are deserted; most stores have disappeared, crushed by the hypermarkets out on the highway. In this town, Ms. Le Pen took 37.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the election on April 10, pushing Mr. Macron into a distant second with 23.6 percent.Jean-Michel Gérard, 66, one of the kir drinkers, worked in the meat business from age 15, as a butcher, in slaughterhouses, or as a trucker hauling beef carcasses. But he had to stop at 60, when his knees gave out from regularly carrying several tons of meat a day on his back, the record being a single 465-pound rear of a bull.“Now we have a generation of slackers,” he said. “When I was young, if you did not work, you did not eat.”The old France of solidarity and fraternity had disappeared, he lamented, gone like the horse butchers where he started work and replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence.The old France of solidarity and fraternity has disappeared and been replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence, said Jean-Michel Gérard, who worked in the meat industry until a few years ago.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesHe voted for the left until François Mitterrand, the former Socialist president, imposed limits on work hours, and then switched his allegiance to the far-right National Front party, now Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally. What infuriated him, he said, was foreigners collecting social benefits and handouts without working.“We didn’t want to work less, we wanted to work more to earn more. What’s the use of free time without money?” he asked. “If foreigners work, they have their place. If not, no.”Mr. Gérard gazed out at the church. That jogged a memory. The other day, he said, he saw a young man from the Maghreb urinating on the church wall. He shouted at the man, who looked about 17. “What would you do if I urinated on a mosque?”The fraught relationship between France and Islam — in the country with the largest Muslim population in Western Europe and a recent history of terrorist attacks — has been one of the themes of the election campaign. Mr. Macron has called Ms. Le Pen’s program racist for wanting to make head scarves illegal on the grounds that they constitute a threatening “Islamist uniform” — on the face of it, an extraordinary claim, given that an overwhelming majority of Muslims in France just want to live peacefully.Muslims attending Friday Prayer this week at a mosque in an eastern suburb of Paris. The fraught relationship between France and Islam has been one of the themes of the election campaign.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times“If women are wearing them just for their religion, OK,” Mr. Gérard said, “but I think in general it’s a provocation.”Maryvonne Duché, another firm supporter of Ms. Le Pen, was seated at a table close by. She started work at 14 as a sales clerk, before spending 34 years on the production line at a nearby Philips electronics factory, which closed 12 years ago.“Apart from two pregnancies, I worked nonstop from age 14 to 60, and now I have a pension of 1,160 euros a month,” she said — or about $1,250. “It’s pathetic, with almost half going in rent, but Macron doesn’t care.”And Ms. Le Pen? “I don’t love her, but I will vote for her to get rid of Macron.”The view of Mr. Macron in this town was of near-universal disdain: a man with no respect for French people, removed from reality, so cerebral he has no idea of “real life,” insensitive to the everyday problems of many people, from a class that has “never changed a kid’s diaper,” in Mr. Gérard’s words.Ms. Le Pen, by contrast, is seen as someone who will protect people from the disruptive onslaught of the modern world.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      France’s Big Decision

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      Rachelle Bonja, Kaitlin Roberts and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen they go to the polls on Sunday, voters in France will be faced with the same two presidential candidates as 2017: Emmanuel Macron, the president and a polished centrist, and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally party.Yet the context is different. There is a war in Europe, and the contest is tight.What are the stakes in the runoff election, and how has the race become so close?On today’s episodeRoger Cohen, Paris bureau chief for The New York Times.President Emmanuel Macron, left, and Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, squared off in a debate on Wednesday ahead of the runoff.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinBackground readingPresident Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, in the runoff on Sunday. The outcome will be crucial for France and reverberate globally.No French president has been the object of such intense dislike among significant segments of the population as Mr. Macron. How deep that loathing runs will be a critical factor in the election.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Roger Cohen contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Chelsea Daniel, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky and John Ketchum.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Wendy Dorr, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli and Maddy Masiello. More

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      As Marine Le Pen Moves Closer to French Presidency, Putin Ties Persist

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      As elections approach Sunday, the far-right candidate is linked to the Russian president by a web of financial ties and a history of support that has hardly dimmed despite the war in Ukraine.PARIS — When Europe’s far-right leaders gathered in Madrid in January, they had no problem finding unity on the issues they hold dear, whether cracking down on immigrants or upholding “European Christian ideals.” But as Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, they were divided on one issue: the threat posed by President Vladimir V. Putin.Marine Le Pen, the extreme-right challenger for the French presidency, objected to a paragraph in the final statement calling for European solidarity to confront “Russian military actions on the eastern border of Europe.” Even in a gathering of illiberal nationalists, she was an outlier in her fealty to Mr. Putin.Now, on her campaign website, the leaders’ statement appears with that paragraph cut in an unacknowledged change to the text. This little subterfuge is consistent with an embrace of Mr. Putin so complete that even his ravaging of Ukraine has hardly diminished it.Over the past decade, Ms. Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, formerly the National Front, has borrowed millions from a Russian bank, and Ms. Le Pen has supported Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, as well as his incendiary meddling that year in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where just this week Russia redoubled its offensive.Her support for Mr. Putin is one thing in a time of peace and another in a time of war. Russia, a nuclear power, has invaded a European state, and Ms. Le Pen is closer than ever to her cherished goal of becoming president of France, having narrowed the gap with President Emmanuel Macron before the decisive round of the election on Sunday.Supporters of Ms. Le Pen at a campaign rally in Stiring-Wendel, France, on April 1. She has come closer to Mr. Macron in polls as a decisive election round nears.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesWith polls showing Ms. Le Pen gaining about 44.5 percent of the vote to Mr. Macron’s 55.5 percent, she is within range of the shocks that produced Brexit and Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2016. As in Britain and the United States, alienation and economic hardship have fed a French readiness to gamble on nationalist dreams.If Ms. Le Pen wins, which is not likely but possible, her victory will almost certainly fracture the allied unity engineered by President Biden in an attempt to defeat Mr. Putin. It would hand Mr. Putin by far his most important ally in Europe, one he could leverage in his aims to divide Europe from the United States and fracture Europe’s decades-old project of unity.France, a core member of the European Union and NATO, is suddenly the possible soft underbelly of the West.Julien Nocetti, a Russia expert at the French Institute of International Relations, said there was “a complete ideological alignment between Putin and Le Pen” — one that would be deeply worrying to France’s American and European allies.The Ukraine war has caused Ms. Le Pen to pivot a little by saying Mr. Putin crossed “a red line” with the invasion, but she still says her foreign-policy priority is a rapprochement with Russia once the fighting stops.Bodies being loaded onto a truck in Bucha, Ukraine, where evidence of Russian atrocities mounted. Ms. Le Pen said that Mr. Putin crossed “a red line” with the invasion but also that she will seek a rapprochement with Russia.Daniel Berehulak for The New York TimesSince Ms. Le Pen, 53, took over the leadership of her party in 2011, she has only deepened its Putin predilection, making four trips to Moscow and one to Crimea. She would support sanctions against Russia, she says, but not cutting off imports of Russian oil and gas, which she has equated with economic death for France.“We have to think of our people,” she said in a recent TV interview, a position consistent with the strong focus on pocketbook issues that has propelled her campaign. The majority of French people are more focused on getting to the end of the month than getting Russia out of Ukraine.Certainly, Ms. Le Pen vaunted her connection with Mr. Putin until he went to war on Feb. 24. She included a photo of herself shaking hands with him in her election brochure as evidence of her “international stature.” This handout disappeared abruptly from view after the Russian invasion.The photo was taken at the Kremlin on March 24, 2017. That was less than five weeks before the first round of the last presidential election, in which Mr. Macron defeated Ms. Le Pen by 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent. The National Rally leader said then that she would immediately review lifting “unjust” sanctions against Russia if elected.As for Mr. Putin, he said with a knowing smirk that Russia did “not want to influence events in any way.”Shopping at a supermarket in Livry-Gargan, Paris, in December. Most French voters are more concerned about the economy than the Ukraine war.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesJean-Maurice Ripert, the French ambassador in Moscow from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that a fellow European ambassador, a close friend, had asked the Russian leader after the French election why he had backed Ms. Le Pen.“Because I had been told she was going to win,” Mr. Putin said.Certainly that is what he wanted. Ms. Le Pen, committed to “equidistance” between great powers and hostile to “America’s protectorate on European soil,” sees in Mr. Putin the defender of the nation-state, family and Christianity against border-eroding multilateralism and irreligious cultural decay.“It’s all about sovereignty,” said Marlène Laruelle, the French director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian studies at George Washington University. “The sovereign state against international organizations; the sovereign traditional family against L.G.B.T.Q. rights.”Then there is the money. Unable to get a loan from French banks, Ms. Le Pen and several of her top aides scrambled for cash in Russia, accepting a 9.4 million euro loan, then $12.2 million, at a 6 percent interest rate, from the First Czech-Russian Bank in September 2014. It was supposed to be repaid by 2019.A branch of the First Czech-Russian Bank in Moscow, before it collapsed in 2016. Ms. Le Pen received millions in loans from the bank.Dmitry Serebryakov/TASS/Alamy Live NewsWallerand de Saint-Just, who was long the National Rally’s treasurer before leaving the position last year, negotiated the deal in Moscow. In a written answer to a question as to why French banks had refused any loan to the National Rally, he said “My experience with the six big French banking groups is that they obey orders from the political executive.”But given the lack of transparency and accountability in Russia’s financial sector — and Mr. Putin’s sway over it in his pay-to-play system — the sum has long raised hard questions of just how beholden Ms. Le Pen actually is to the Russian president, and whether some of her outspoken backing for him has been a consequence.I asked Ms. Le Pen this month at a news conference whether the outstanding loan did not create at least the impression of dependence on Russia, a liability for any future president?“Absolutely not,” she said. “I am totally independent of any link to any power.”In her current campaign, again unable to get a loan from a French bank, Ms. Le Pen turned to Hungary, where Viktor Orban, the anti-immigrant Hungarian prime minister, has been in power for 12 years. A Hungarian bank has now lent the National Rally another $11.4 million, so if she were to win she would be indebted to both Mr. Putin and Mr. Orban.Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, center, attending a meeting of far-right and conservative leaders in Madrid, in January.Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlready her backing of Mr. Putin has been borderline fawning. Ms. Le Pen visited Moscow and Crimea in June 2013; Moscow in April 2014; and Moscow again in May 2015. She was received by the president of the Duma, the lower chamber of Russia’s Parliament, during the first of these visits, and sprinkled her Russian sojourns with pro-Putin remarks.In 2013, she blamed the European Union for a new “Cold War on Russia.” In 2015, also while in Moscow, she criticized France’s pro-American stance and suggested this would change “in 2017 with Marine Le Pen as president.” In 2021, she recommended Russia’s uncertain Sputnik vaccine for the coronavirus, saying “our anti-Russian ideology should not ruin our capacity to vaccinate our fellow citizens.”The 2014 visit came at a particularly delicate moment, given the Crimea annexation. It was one of several demonstrations of support for Mr. Putin from prominent members of Ms. Le Pen’s party who visited Crimea that year, and the Donbas, the Ukrainian region where clashes kindled by Moscow had begun.Among them was Aymeric Chauprade, her former top diplomatic adviser, who went to Crimea to observe the dubious March 2014 referendum that massively backed the Russian annexation. A United Nations General Assembly resolution declared the vote invalid.“It was the West that began changing European borders with Kosovo’s independence in 2008,” Mr. Chauprade, who has since left the National Rally, said in an interview. “There was an openness to accepting invitations from Russia, a good atmosphere.”Russian troops guarded a Ukrainian marine base in Crimea as Mr. Putin moved to annex the peninsula in March 2014. Le Pen has visited Moscow and Crimea and made remarks that were supportive of Russia.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesMediapart, a French investigative news website, was the first to expose the Russian loan to the National Rally in September 2014. In an earlier interview with Mediapart, Mr. Chauprade said visits to the Donbas that year and in 2015 by Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a former National Rally member of the European Parliament, had been a “quid pro quo” for the loan.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      N.Y. House Districts Illegally Favor Democrats, Appeals Court Rules

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      A divided five-judge panel found that Democrats engaged in gerrymandering in creating new district maps. The case is expected to head to New York’s highest court.A New York appeals court ruled on Thursday that new congressional districts drawn by Democrats violated the state’s ban on partisan gerrymandering, partially upholding a lower-court ruling that would block the state from using the lines in this year’s critical midterm elections.A divided five-judge panel in Rochester said Democratic legislative leaders had drawn the new House map “to discourage competition and favor Democrats,” knowingly ignoring the will of voters who recently approved a constitutional amendment outlawing the practice.“We are satisfied that petitioners established beyond a reasonable doubt that the Legislature acted with partisan intent,” a three-judge majority wrote in its opinion. Two judges dissented.Gov. Kathy Hochul and top legislative leaders are expected to immediately appeal the decision to the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. The judges there, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, have indicated they could render a final verdict as soon as next week.The outcome in New York will have significant implications in the broader fight for control of the House of Representatives. National Democratic leaders are counting on the maps their party drew in New York to help offset gains by Republicans.Without them, Democrats are at risk of emerging from this year’s redistricting cycle having been bested by Republicans for the second consecutive decade. Republican gains were on track to grow further after Florida lawmakers this week approved a map drawn by Gov. Ron DeSantis that would create four new Republican-friendly seats.The ruling was the second consecutive setback for New York’s Democratic mapmakers, and this time it came in an appellate court that was viewed as generally friendly to the party.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.“Like other state courts around the country, New York courts aren’t finding the question of whether a map is a partisan gerrymander a particularly hard one to decide,” said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s very hard to defend a map like New York’s, and ultimately if it quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.”Still, Mr. Li added, Thursday’s decision was only the second of three acts in New York’s redistricting legal drama.On Thursday, the judges from the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court ordered the Democrat-led Legislature to promptly redraft the map by April 30 or leave the task to a court-appointed neutral expert. The judges were largely silent on another key question at stake: whether some of the primaries scheduled for June should be postponed until August to accommodate new districts.The congressional lines in question, adopted by Democratic supermajorities in the Legislature in February, would give Democrats a clear advantage in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional districts by shifting voters favorable to their party into redrawn seats on Long Island and Staten Island and in Central New York, and packing Republicans in a smaller number of districts. Republicans currently hold eight districts on a map that was drawn by a court-appointed special master in 2012.State leaders did emerge with some good news from the latest ruling. The panel rejected more sweeping parts of the decision by the lower-court judge, Patrick F. McAllister of Steuben County, that held that lawmakers lacked the authority to draw any maps at all after New York’s newly created redistricting commission failed to agree on a plan for the state.As a result, the appeals court ruling reinstated State Senate and Assembly maps that Justice McAllister had thrown out.Mike Murphy, a spokesman for Senate Democrats, said they were “pleased” that the appeals court had validated the Legislature’s right to draw the maps this year, and predicted the higher court would reinstate the congressional maps as well.“We always knew this case would end at the Court of Appeals and look forward to being heard on our appeal to uphold the congressional map as well,” he said.John Faso, a spokesman for the Republican-backed voters challenging the maps, said that they would file their own appeal to try to strike the state legislative maps. But he called Thursday’s decision a “great victory.”The broader legal dispute turns on two interlocking questions: whether the mapmaking process properly adhered to procedures laid out in a 2014 amendment to the State Constitution, and whether the maps themselves violated an accompanying ban on drawing districts for partisan gain.The procedural changes made in 2014 were designed to remove the line-drawing process from the hands of politicians by creating an outside commission to solicit public input and forge a bipartisan proposal for House, State Senate and Assembly districts. If the commission had reached agreement, the Legislature’s role would have been to ratify the maps.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More