In difficult circumstances, Emmanuel Macron has managed to win the Presidency twice—a sign that he is, in fact, resilient, and that the political reservoir of common sense in France remains.
, got less than ten per cent of the vote. With the the traditional French conservative parties having collapsed, from their own incompetence, there is nothing remotely surprising, in French terms, about far-right nationalism trying to pass itself off as something more palatable—any more than there is about that phenomenon in the United States.New York time, Le Pen had managed just around forty-two per cent of the vote, to Macron’s fifty-eight.
Successful pragmatists in power will never have the glamour of even unsuccessful ideologues. The British journalist Helen Lewisthe grudging reluctance to recognize the significance of Macron’s first election, in 2017, writing, “We must now confront an uncomfortable question.
It will be an ugly second term: there will be demonstrations, and the President will be called an even worse failure than he had been before. Loud declarations of the death of democracy will be shouted from the rooftops, and the next unanswerable crisis that France confronts will be once again confronted. In other words, French political life will carry on as it has since 1958—or really, since 1789. But the worst have been kept out of power, and didn’t come near winning it.
“To the victor belong the spoils” is a bad slogan in a democracy, since the oscillation of parties in power is, or ought to be, permanent. But let not this victory be spoiled; it was real, and, with its endorsement of humane values against brutal and autocratic ones, and of liberal pluralism against reactionary purism, it is of planetary significance.
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