Emmanuel Macron, 39, Elected new President of France

Emmanuel Macron, 39, Elected new President of France

Centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron, has beaten far right Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s monumental French election in a landslide victory that saw him sweep more than 65 per cent of the total votes cast.

Mr Macron, the pro-business, pro-EU candidate, becomes the youngest president in the 59-year history of France’s Fifth Republic, and will take over from Socialist, Francoise Hollande.

A banker with little political experience, the youthful, charismatic Macron led an improbable campaign, En Marche! (Onward!) that amounted to a biting rebuke of the country’s long-dominant political establishment, NYT writes.

His victory comes after a massive hacking attack on his campaign database over the weekend which saw hundreds of thousands of private emails and official documents dumped online, and represents a clear rejection of the ultra-nationalist views of Front National’s Le Pen.

Then election also comes as a relief to the European Union, which Ms. Le Pen had threatened to leave, a step that would have fundamentally destabilized the bloc and entire western alliance still reeling from the Brexit vote.

Le Pen earlier made a congratulatory call to Macron, promising to offer the stiffest of oppositions.

“The National Front … must deeply renew itself in order to rise to the historic opportunity and meet the French people’s expectations,” she said.

“I will propose to start this deep transformation of our movement in order to make a new political force.”

Macron was initially given a slim chance of winning after forming the En Marche! movement a little over a year ago, but his centrist views appealed to many who considered Le Pen a disaster.

His immediate concerns will be security and immigration as France has been rocked by a number of Islamist terror attacks in recent times.