Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has received the most votes in Sunday’s first-round presidential election.
He and Marine le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Rally, will advance to the next round of the vote, due to be held later this month.
In French presidential elections an initial round of balloting is held and if no one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the top two candidates move onto a second and final round.
Macron won the support of 27.6% of those who cast their ballots this weekend, followed by Le Pen on 23.4%.
Fiery far-left politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was third with 22%.
Eric Zemmour, a far-right journalist and writer, came in fourth with seven percent of the vote.
There were eight other candidates, none of whom received more than five percent of the vote. This included the candidates which were representing the two parties which had traditionally dominated French politics in the past. Valerie Pecresse, of the Republicans, the successor party to the traditional centre-right and Gaullist movement in France, won only 4.8%. Anne Hidalgo, of the traditional major centre-left party in France, the Socialists, fared even worse, not even winning two percent.
Macron and Le Pen will now face each other in what will be a rematch of the second round of the 2017 presidential election. That time Macron won 66% of the vote to Le Pen’s 34%. Although polls indicate that Macron is likely to win this run-off too, it will be much closer with most polls suggesting that the incumbent will edge it by a much smaller margin of 52-48.