WIKIMEDIA, OFFICIAL LEWEB PHOTOSTo the relief of many French scientists, outsider Emmanuel Macron handily won the French presidency in a run-off election yesterday (May 7), defeating his opponent, the National Front candidate Marine Le Pen, 66 to 34 percent.
“I am more than relieved, I am delighted to see that Emmanuel Macron has won the election by a wide margin,” Catherine Cesarsky, an astrophysicist at the CEA, France’s atomic energy commission, told Nature News.
While planning overall budget cuts, Macron has pledged to preserve funding for science and education and to invest in the environment and clean energy, Nature reported. And unlike his adversary Marine Le Pen, Macron supports remaining in the European Union, which is important for “the circulation of brains and ideas,” according to nine directors of French scientific research institutes who wrote a letter to Agence France Presse, Science reported April 28.
The letter came days after French citizens, in the first round of the presidential election April 23, chose Macron ...
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