French president-elect Emmanuel Macron greets supporters as he arrives to deliver a speech in front of the Pyramid at the Louvre Museum in Paris on May 7, 2017, after the second round of the French presidential election. PHOTO: AFP
As predicted Emmanuel Macron won the race for the French presidency from the far-right Front National (FN) leader, Marine Le Pen, by a wide margin. He took 65.1 per cent of the vote to Le Pen’s 34.9. Around 25 per cent of the registered electorate abstained and 4.2 million spoiled their ballot papers — a legitimate option in French elections. Macron politically is in his infancy and has no party in a formal sense, instead is leading a ‘movement’. By contrast Le Pen is an old hand, with a developed party political machine behind her and a long history of far-right activism. She may have been defeated in the macro sense but from another perspective, this is a very significant gain for the far-right, which can now claim, having garnered 11 million votes, to be a part of the political mainstream in France. The turnout for the election was the lowest for 40 years and France stands today as a politically divided nation.
It is unlikely that Macron is going to unify France any time soon and he will eventually govern at the front of a complex coalition with the FN as a formal opposition. The problems are formidable with unemployment in the younger demographic close to 25 per cent, tensions within the EU and the mountain to climb that is Brexit. How he will push back against the obvious groundswell of populism that has driven the rise of the FN, is unknown.
Once again a national electorate has chosen to opt for a leader outside the mainstream — indeed outside of politics, more generally, as although Macron was a minister in the last government he has never held an elected office, not unlike President Trump who never held a cabinet position before his election. France remains in a state of emergency courtesy of terrorism, the economy is stagnant and the battle now is between the Macron ‘globalists’ and the Le Pen ‘patriots’. It will be a long and bitter fight.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 9th, 2017.
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