Paris — Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France on Sunday with a business-friendly vision of European integration, defeating Marine Le Pen, a far-right nationalist who threatened to take France out of the European Union, early projections showed. The centrist’s emphatic victory, which also smashed the dominance of France’s mainstream parties, will bring huge relief to European allies who had feared another populist upheaval to follow Britain’s vote to quit the EU and Donald Trump’s election as US president. Five projections, issued within minutes of polling stations closing at 8pm, showed Macron beating Le Pen by about 65% to 35% — a gap wider than the 20 or so percentage points that pre-election surveys had pointed to. Even so, it was a record performance for the National Front, a party whose anti-immigrant policies until recently made it a pariah in French politics, and underlined the scale of the divisions that Macron must now try to heal. Le Pen’s high-spending, anti-glo...
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