France Picks a Novice

Almost none of what he said was true. Last year, Macron defected from the unpopular Socialist party to found his own political movement, En Marche. He had served as the economics minister of the very unpopular president François Hollande. But he had a seductive power on the stump that was visible almost immediately. Since January, every poll of the French electorate had shown him advancing to the run-off in France’s two-round presidential elections. After it became clear in April that he would square off against the nationalist Marine Le Pen, whose National Front opposes both mass immigration and the European Union, his victory was not just possible .  .  . it was inevitable.

Le Pen represented the français de souche: the people who were born there and whose parents built the country’s millennia-old culture. As Le Pen sees it, immigration, globalization, and membership in the multinational European Union have cost France most of its good working-class jobs and much of its culture, and will eventually mean the end of the country itself. She had sought to purge her party of the extremism that marked it when her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded it in the early 1970s. That turned out to be an Augean job. Speaking or writing in favor of the National Front, leave aside voting for it, remains taboo.

Macron loves all the stuff she hates. He represented those one might call the français de sushi, or as he described them to a business magazine, “those who experience globalization and the big transformations underway as an opportunity.” The vindication of France’s globalizers on May 7 was stunning. Macron did not just beat Le Pen—he destroyed her, taking almost two-thirds of the vote, beyond what even the polls predicted. He won across virtually the whole of France, but it was in the rich, powerful cosmopolitan cities that he did best. In the center of Paris, he beat her by 90-10. Among French people living in United States, he won by 92-8.

Although Macron was never in danger once he squared off with Le Pen, it is easy to understand why newspapers around the world have been talking about “the markets” or “Europe” or “the world” breathing a “sigh of relief.” Something very big has indeed happened in France. It has to do with the scale of Le Pen’s defeat and with generational change. French politics, which seemed to be undergoing a transformation congenial to populists and democrats throughout the world, has in fact not been so transformed. This is the first sign that the democratic tsunami that has been moving towards all Western elites since the Brexit vote last summer might pass some of them by.

For the past generation, France’s conservative party, the Republicans, have represented the winners of the old economy, Socialists the winners of the new. Voters, sick of the system the two had put in place, threw both parties out in the first round. The Socialists were thrown out in name only. A large part of the party’s hierarchy has been able to use the Macron candidacy as a lifeboat. And while it was next to impossible to see how Le Pen would win this time, it was anyone’s guess what French politics would face in the coming years. Maybe some kind of populist uprising. Maybe Le Pen herself would be president in five years’ time. Consider: On top of her base of 21 percent of the vote, she seemed in a good position to take half the Catholic right (about 10 percent) and half the post-Communist left (another 10 percent), along with a few unaffiliated patriots of various descriptions. That would have placed her above 40 percent. A scandal, an illness, a war, an economic downturn—she would be a hiccup away from the presidency.

Macron, who understood this dynamic better than anybody, is now going to suffer for his successes. He had hoped to turn En Marche from a movement into a party that could replace the Socialists. With a little luck, it might even replace both main parties—since, in the face of populist movements, establishment parties in Western countries have tended to collude rather than compete. France’s legislative elections are next month. Macron insists that politicians who want to run as En Marche candidates must resign their party memberships. Former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls has already done so. But Macron has inflicted a bit too much damage on Le Pen. Those Gaullists who might have been induced to accept a seat from Macron to fend off a “fascist threat” if the result had been a close-run thing now lack a pretext. There is no fascist threat. At 34 percent, Le Pen may have set a record for her party, but she is not a hiccup away from anything.

The question is whether her party has had its day. The French still mostly hate globalization. She is the most full-throated foe of globalization and the things that come with it: “free markets, hire-and-fire economies, sell-offs, vested interests, and identity politics.” Macron represents those things, which is why he gives even many of his voters the creeps. As Arnaud Leparmentier of Le Monde noted, 10 of the 11 candidates in this presidential election, all except Macron, had voted at some point to pull France out of the European Union. The leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon—a more salonfähig anti-globalist than Le Pen—would not endorse Macron over Le Pen. But something has failed in Le Pen’s project of washing away the National Front’s historic traces of anti-Semitism and hostility to the French state. Le Pen is an impressive, intelligent, and sophisticated person. Nationalist she is, and given to jingoistic accounts of France’s role in the world wars, but she gives no evidence of being a bigot.

The problem is that her party has for a long time been an institution for a different kind of person. When at the end of the first round, Le Pen resigned her party chairmanship, there was nothing unusual about that: Since Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic, the French presidency has been officially “above party,” and so must its claimants be. Nor was it unusual that she would announce secretary general Jean-François Jalkh, a long-serving party regular, to replace her. What was unusual was Jalkh’s having wondered in a 2000 interview whether Zyklon-B gas was sufficiently toxic to have been used in the Nazi gas chambers. It would be an embarrassment if anyone in the party ruminated in this way—but the new top guy? Who would take a risk on such a party?

In private, not even Le Pen herself. Her need to wall herself off from certain of her party’s former leaders must have turned her six years as leader into an endurance test. As government has become more bureaucratic and complicated, politics has come to require more teamwork. Working out a candidate’s position on, say, the optimum level for eurozone interest rates, or whether France’s retirement age must rise, takes days of work and consultation. Macron, the Socialist Benoît Hamon, and the Republican François Fillon all had entire committees of economic experts working on that stuff. Le Pen had almost no one, save a political consigliere named Florian Philippot. She was winging it, relying on nothing but her ideology and her wits, rather as Donald Trump had done in his campaign. This made her, like Trump, the single most impressive personality in the race. It also made her operation, like Trump’s, look erratic and reckless to a majority of voters.

And ultimately there was a disconnect between Le Pen and her own voters. Unlike the campaigners in the Brexit referendum, unlike Trump, she refused to address the public’s most visceral fears—about being swamped by millions of immigrants alien to their culture. In fact, she scarcely mentioned immigration at all until the final days. She focused instead on the weaknesses of the euro, the common currency of the European Union, and on the means (a referendum) by which she would extract France from the union. Quite possibly history will absolve her—the euro stands a good chance of collapsing, and bringing the whole European Union down with it. But right now that kind of subject is more useful for filling lecture halls than campaign rallies.

Nor did Le Pen tap into any of the mostly Catholic conservative movements that have arisen since 2013, when President François Hollande’s legalization of gay marriage brought millions of protesters into the streets. Le Pen didn’t join those protests. Some have blamed Le Pen’s advisers for her reluctance to address voters who were there for the taking, but a simpler explanation is this: She is young enough that she cannot see why anyone would care about the definition of marriage. A biography released in February calls her une bobo chez les fachos—a yuppie among fascists.

In a sense, Le Pen’s inability to convince her father’s loyalists is a variation of the tragedy that tribunes of the people have faced in all times and places. When people of distinction have children, they belong to society’s elite. This is true even when their distinction comes from attacking elites. We can see it in the United States. Should the Trump presidency end badly, one senses it will have something to do with the fact the president’s two most trusted advisers, his daughter Ivanka and her husband, are members of the class that he was brought to power to tame. The people on whom he depends for votes are invisible to the people on whom he depends for advice.

Most of Le Pen’s arguments against Macron are more true than not. Macron’s plan really is a rattlebag of businessman’s bromides from the Reagan era. His solution to everything really is “more Europe,” and that really does mean less France. In fact, his manifesto calls for common European budgeting, which would mean the end of France as anything but a local cultural authority.

It is hard to say what Macron stands for, aside from a poorly defined centrism. In the French press lately, centrist means “not Hitler.” Macron has taken advantage of this low bar, though his own rhetoric is always strange, often in a Nietzschean way. Those who shrink from the challenges of globalization are weaklings, in his view. He mocked them during one of the debates, chirping: “Oh it’s so hard, globalization!”—and promised to bring “the real spirit of French conquest” to the international economy. He says everything and its opposite. Pressed during the debate to define his position towards Donald Trump, he said his policy would be in the line of former presidents Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand, arch-foes for two decades. “Gaullo-Mitterrandien” was the word he coined for it. This is rather like promising a Nixon-McGovern defense budget or a Bush-Obama approach to the Middle East.

The press was unanimously on his side. One of the debate moderators, Nathalie Saint-Cricq, won the scorn of Le Pen’s supporters by cutting her off just as she was laying into Macron about the hypocrisy of running against the record of a government he had served. Two days before the vote, the En Marche email servers were hacked, leading Rachel Donadio of the New York Times to note the breadth of the consensus in deciding not to publish them:

These shades of left and right are interesting, and all the establishment papers may have had particular reasons for not releasing information damaging to Macron, but it would have been worth mentioning that they all backed him, too.

One would need to cast one’s mind back a decade to find a world leader who came to office with such a combination of inexperience and adulation. The risk is that the adulation will give free rein to the inexperience. In the days after Macron’s election he and his represent­atives took the first steps to carry out his program—the battle against climate change, the “moralization of our public life,” parity between men and women in legislative posts, pro-business reforms that are too urgent to await the say-so of a dawdling legislature. What about the traditional preoccupations of the French state? What about democracy?

“The France you are defending isn’t France,” Marine Le Pen told him at one point in the debate. What person born before 1975 could disagree? The change here might be less ideological than generational. Most of us have noted the way, in all of our Western countries, the levers of power are slipping from the hands of citizens and into the hands of bureaucrats and businessmen. But we have always had a sense that we can reclaim them any time we want. Surely power eventually comes back into the hands of “the people,” to whom it “naturally” belongs. Surely this kind of election, which winds up pitting an unsavory nationalist against a cynical globalist, is just an exception. Right?

We forget that the Cold War has been over for a generation, and it has now been a quarter-century since French voters chose, by a razor-thin majority, to ratify the Maastricht treaty that established the EU. It turns out that when a country surrenders its sovereignty, it launches itself onto a fast-flowing river. France has traveled a long constitutional distance since then. Today there are people in politics who can talk your ear off about “synergy” and “inclusion,” but if you tell them about patriotism or freedom of speech they will give you a blank look. The torch has been passed to a new generation, the generation of Macron, who at the time the Berlin Wall fell was 11 years old.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.