Emmanuel Macron’s victory is not just good news for France and for Europe. It brings a welcome remedy to the populist fever that hit the United Kingdom with Brexit, and the United States with Donald Trump.
We are experiencing an “age of anger”, as Pankaj Mishra described our troubled times. In France, as in most large western democracies, many people have expressed – at the ballot box or on the street – their anger at a system that no longer offers them a future. With more than 3 million unemployed and 9 million in poverty, and a school system that no longer provides equality of opportunity, France – the country of the enlightenment – has ceased to shine, and its influence in the world is dwindling.
As a result, the risk of victory for the extreme-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, was immense. Populism’s various faces are merchants of fear and the parasites of dysfunction and failure; and they have bred in the absence of any profound national reforms over the past 20 years.
The vote of more than a third of the French electorate for Le Pen illustrates the allure of political extremes. No French political party that has already held power has been able to stop this populist movement. The established parties were all eliminated in the primaries and then in the first round of the presidential election. This dégagisme (telling politicians to “get out”) is one of the main characteristics of a movement of defiance that positions the population against the elites.
It needed therefore a new man – experienced, yes, but young, smart, advocating not the triumph of one camp (right or left), but reuniting them in a pragmatic and ambitious way with the best ideas and personalities of the right, the centre and the left. En Marche! was created by Macron just one year ago. Political leaders laughed then, but with 270,000 members and a candidate now elected president of the republic, it has become France’s leading political movement.
And yet Macron never balked at introducing ideas that were diametrically opposed to those of the populists. He championed the advantages of globalisation, while wishing to regulate it. He refused protectionism and the end of free trade. He called on us to be European in a reinvented Europe, to accept our share of immigration and to defend our secularism – that is, the protection by the state of the right of all to believe or not.
On the one hand he managed to convince people that it was important to liberate the country’s potential, create much better incentives for work, embrace entrepreneurship, free up markets, lower taxes, and give more autonomy to professors and school heads. And on the other hand, he said that it was vital to better protect the French by training them to do jobs in a new world, to focus the “welfare state” on those most in need, and to fight growing insecurity – both physical and material – with better teaching and more police officers.
What lessons can be drawn for the rest of the world? Macron has, in ending the left-right split, and slowed down the growth of populism, but – equally important – he has created a central platform that is strong, ambitious, reforming and optimistic, built on a clear understanding of the new world.
He will, however, need visible results in the next five years, or the extreme right or extreme left could win the 2022 presidential election.
The world should watch Macron closely. Because if he wins the war against populism and reduces unemployment while increasing stability, he can be an inspiration to many around the world.
