John O’Sullivan:
The outcome of yesterday’s French presidential election is easily explained. In the qualifying round two weeks ago Emmanuel Macron defeated all the other non–Front National candidates in the competition to be least like Marine Le Pen. And because he was obviously much less like Marine Le Pen than Marine Le Pen herself in yesterday’s final round, he defeated her by roughly two-to-one.
Indeed, it is looking as if Le Pen underperformed even the low expectations of those who thought she would lose, getting only 34 percent when some observers expected her to break the 40 percent barrier. Michael Barone points out that she lost la France Profonde as well as Paris to Macron, winning just two regions outright, and doing relatively well only in areas hit by recession or by high Muslim migration.
Though its size is remarkable, however, Le Pen’s defeat is the opposite of a surprise. It’s long been clear that most French voters would not support Le Pen or the National Front at any price. Earlier polls had shown that every other presidential candidate would defeat her in a run-off. The entire French establishment and all the other parties called for her to be crushed. And she suffered from the standard bias of the media and political elites that the most extravagant charges can be leveled against “right-wing” politicians with no need for evidence nor penalty for error.
That said, there were surprises buried — and not far down — in the statistics. No fewer than 12 million voters cast “spoiled” ballots when confronted with these two candidates (some writing rude remarks on the ballot paper, I regret to tell you). If you count those abstentions as votes, they mean that though Macron won two-thirds of the Macron-Le Pen total, he won less than 50 percent of all who went to the polls either to vote or to protest. Other Macron supporters told pollsters they had voted against Le Pen rather than for Macron. And since turnout itself was slightly lower than usual in presidential elections, everything suggests a very high level of disaffection among French voters.
It contrasts oddly with the unqualified expressions of euphoria among European and national leaders welcoming a historic victory for France and Europe with “Ode to Joy” as their anthem. All that seems a little unreal. Indeed, before a single vote had been cast, observers such as Charlie Cooke and Christopher Caldwell pointed to the curious likelihood that a country moving right was about to elect a Left president and that a nation angry with both the governing Socialists and the establishment was about to choose an énarque graduate of an establishment training ground who was in the Socialist government until yesterday to govern it.
Now it’s happened. So it inevitably seems less odd. But common sense suggests that some serious clashes are about to erupt between Macron’s ideas and political realities and between some of the different ideas wrestling inside for mastery of his mind. He is, for instance, a passionate Europhile who wants to relaunch the European Union. His commitment to the euro goes to the extent of wanting a fiscal government with a single finance minister for the eurozone that would then become a transfer union with “mutualization” of debts. Germany will like almost all of this because it promises to impose fiscal discipline upon otherwise unruly eurozone countries. But the Germans are determined to avert the threat of a transfer union with debt mutualization, which, as they see it, would amount to giving Greece and Italy the keys to the German treasury at the very moment that the U.K. will have opted out of subsidizing Europe in any way. Expect communiques written in vanishing ink.
Macron is also talking up his intention to reform the over-regulated French economy and dash for prosperity. We’ve heard these plans before — in particular from Jacques Chirac (in his first presidency) and Nicolas Sarkozy. But they were very soon abandoned. They inevitably bump into obstacles such as the labor unions, the entrenched belief in the “French social model,” and not least the chains of an over-valued exchange rate, today’s euro, that makes French industry uncompetitive (and German industry highly competitive).
