A new political opposition in France — people who don’t vote

That’s how Emilia Julie, a literature student in the populous French capital that helped hand Emmanuel Macron the presidency Sunday, christened the roughly 15.5 million renegades who abstained or voided their ballots. The number amounts to a third of registered voters — staggering by French standards — who wanted no part in choosing between Macron, an independent centrist who will become France’s youngest head of state since Napoleon, and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front.

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WP - That’s how Emilia Julie, a literature student in the populous French capital that helped hand Emmanuel Macron the presidency Sunday, christened the roughly 15.5 million renegades who abstained or voided their ballots. The number amounts to a third of registered voters — staggering by French standards — who wanted no part in choosing between Macron, an independent centrist who will become France’s youngest head of state since Napoleon, and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front.

More people abstained than voted for Le Pen, who won about 10.6 million votes, her party’s best performance in a presidential election. The number of blank and voided ballots was a record for France’s Fifth Republic, founded in 1958.

"I choose not to enter the game,” said Julie, 18, who stayed home Sunday to signal her disagreement with both candidates and to deny Macron a mandate. "The abstentionists are the new opposition. Winning a third of the country is not enough, clearly.”

The right to vote, she said, is important. "But it’s more important to vote for someone you actually want to be in office. And I don’t want to be guilty for what Macron does, or doesn’t do.”

Officials count votes at a polling station in Hede-Bazouges, France. (Damien Meyer/Agemce France-Presse via Getty Images)

André Boursier, a former communist mayor of a small town north of Paris, said Macron is too similar to President François Hollande, a Socialist who will leave office with historically low approval ratings.

"I wasn’t convinced,” he said, "and so I voted blank.”

So did about 4 million others, including those who spoiled their ballots, in what experts described as a militant rejection of "the political system.” They called the historic nonparticipation rate a testament to deepening polarization and a sign of the tough road ahead for Macron, as he prepares for parliamentary elections in June that will decide whether he can govern with a legislative majority.

"It’s not just saying, ‘I don’t care about the choice, so I won’t go to the polling station,’ ” said Sylvain Brouard, a political scientist at Sciences Po in Paris. "It’s saying, ‘I’m going to the polling station, I’m playing the democratic game, but neither of the candidates are good enough for me. So I do not choose.”

It was not so much evidence of depoliticization as a sign of polarization, Brouard said, and "a brutal narrowing of the political supply, the refusal to be satisfied after strongly supporting some specific party or candidate.”

On the one hand, Macron’s victory was resounding — he won 66 percent of the vote.

"But there is also a clear sense of unease with the new president in a large fraction of the electorate,” Brouard said.

He described the abstentions as the birth pangs of political realignment. Disagreements about globalization dominated the campaign, at times appearing to overpower the traditional left-right divide. In the end, however, many who opposed globalization from the left were unwilling to support a party associated with xenophobia and anti-Semitism. And many of those on the right who prize free markets were unwilling to back a candidate with liberal social views.

"For me, Le Pen was impossible,” said Boursier, who voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who led Unbowed France in an alliance with the French Communists.

Polling suggested that Macron had won over more than half of those who had supported Mélenchon, as well as Socialist Benoît Hamon, in the first round. Le Pen’s gains in the second round came mostly from people who had cast their first vote for François Fillon, the center-right candidate. She won 10 percent of Mélenchon supporters, more than a third of whom stayed home.

Didier Rouxel, a local council member representing the National Front, said the party’s future lay in winning over voters from the right, while letting supporters of the far left fracture the other side.

Those who chose to vote blank explained their unease by pointing to the president-elect’s centrist economic ideas, namely his promise to relax certain labor codes.

Ewen Le Douget, 26, voted blank because he saw Macron as "too far to the right.” In the first round of voting, he favored Mélenchon, who wanted to nationalize big banks and take France out of NATO.

"Stability is not always good,” Douget said.