EDITORIAL: Vive la difference
After Brexit and Trump, the French election result comes as a welcome and extraordinary upside shock
After the downside shock of 2016’s Brexit and Trump victories, Sunday night’s French election result came as a welcome and extraordinary upside shock. Centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron, who launched his En Marche! party just a year ago, won a landslide 66% of the vote, beating the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen. The 39-year-old Macron becomes the youngest president in France’s history. His victory is a heartening sign that the anti-establishment sentiment that fed into the Brexit and Trump outcomes isn’t necessarily all right-wing populism and that there is space for a new politics of the centre. Crucially, Macron campaigned on an explicitly pro-Europe, pro-globalisation, pluralist, open society ticket against Le Pen’s neo-fascist espousal of a narrow and divisive French nationalism. Macron had help from some lucky political breaks but his campaign also showed him to be politically astute: he recognised that the long-established parties had opened a space to step into — a...
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