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Ishaan Tharoor<\/p>\n
France\u2019s presidential election is over, but the battle is just beginning. After securing another five-year term in Sunday\u2019s second-round vote, President Emmanuel Macron now braces for the coming legislative elections in June. The centrist leader\u2019s opponents, including the defeated far-right leader Marine Le Pen, have vowed to carry on the battle, and may yet thwart Macron\u2019s bloc in the centre from achieving a decisive parliamentary majority.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is validated with a mandate to continue the work, but no honeymoon is to be expected at all,\u201d said C\u00e9lia Belin, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, during a Monday webinar.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019ll be facing political opposition from Day 1.\u201d<\/p>\n
Analysts expect Macron to use his second term \u2013 he can\u2019t run for reelection in 2027 \u2013 to press hard on some of his signature issues. Recognising the peril of climate change, he has promised to take major steps down France\u2019s path to decarbonise its economy. And he will double down on his vision of a more robust, integrated and geopolitically independent Europe, with France at its heart.<\/p>\n
But myriad questions remain over how Macron will reckon with a society marked by deepening polarisation and disgruntlement. The anger of the gilets jaunes (yellow-vest protesters) who filled France\u2019s streets over Macron\u2019s proposed hike in fuel taxes, has hardly dissipated, nor the pervasive view of the president as an aloof elitist cut off from the ordinary needs of the French public.<\/p>\n
Critics say Macron, whose centrist movement has co-opted elements of France\u2019s much-diminished traditional centre-left and centre-right factions, is walking an impossibly fine line; leftwing disenchantment, in particular, may loom over his second term.<\/p>\n
\u201cA key question will be whether his choices will further amplify growing polarisation in France, split into emboldened far-right and farleft blocs, with Macron and his allies occupying the centre, or whether he can reduce the appeal of the political extremes,\u201d wrote my colleague Rick Noack.<\/p>\n
Yet the fact remains that Macron still scored a decisive victory over Le Pen and showed, yet again, that the far-right candidate has hit a ceiling.<\/p>\n
The European political establishment breathed a sigh of relief on Sunday evening, when it became clear that the occupant of the Elysee would not be a xenophobic Eurosceptic with a history of Russophilia.<\/p>\n
On the same day, Slovenia\u2019s three-term populist prime minister Janez Jansa was defeated by centrist rivals. That and Le Pen\u2019s latest setback were a blow to right-wing nationalists like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has spoken grandiosely of a time when illiberal nationalists will sweep to power across the continent.<\/p>\n
Macron\u2019s re-election, thanks in part to voters who sided with him only to thwart Le Pen, shows that a popular bulwark against such illiberalism still very much exists, no matter Le Pen\u2019s steady electoral gains over the past decade.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggish Macron victory does show that the European ideal is more implanted in EU countries than we might sometimes think,\u201d said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm.<\/p>\n
Now, the focus may turn to infighting within the French far right, with Le Pen possibly scrapping with a rival faction led by nativist firebrand \u00c9ric Zemmour. Those battles may see a \u201ctremendous amount of competition and dysfunction\u201d in the far right, Rahman added, as it struggles to \u201cbecome a more coherent movement under one leader\u201d.<\/p>\n
That leader may not be Le Pen, whose father Jean-Marie Le Pen \u2013 a convicted Holocaust denier and founder of France\u2019s primary far-right party \u2013 was rebuffed in a second-round vote two decades ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis could well be the end of the decades-long cycle in which the French far right was dominated by one family,\u201d political scientist Pascal Perrineau told the Financial Times. \u201cIf the far right are to take power, they will need a new person to embody the movement. But for now it\u2019s still hard to see who that person will be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Right-wing nationalists will have other opportunities to make their mark in Europe. Next year, Italy and Spain are slated to hold general elections. In the former, two far-right parties could dominate a future coalition government. In the latter, the ascendant far-right party Vox has compelled the centre-right Popular Party to tack in its direction. Their opponents fear the rise of a strain of nativism not seen in decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thought we were vaccinated against the far right because of the dictatorship,\u201d Nadia Calvi\u00f1o, first deputy prime minister of Spain, told me, gesturing to Spain\u2019s long rule by fascist dictator Francisco Franco.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, we were not. It shows every society is vulnerable to the rise of extremism and populism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Calvi\u00f1o, who is also the economic minister in Spain\u2019s left-leaning government, added that \u201cwe should not normalise the messages coming from populist far-right parties, which, in the case of Spain, is anti-European, anti-feminist, anti-migration and even opposed to basic elements of our constitution like the decentralised political organisation of the country\u201d.<\/p>\n
In France, though, many lament that the far right has been all but normalised. Even centre-right politicians, like failed presidential candidate Val\u00e9rie P\u00e9cresse, invoke the racist theory of the \u201cGreat Replacement\u201d, which conjures a society where the liberal establishment is seeking to actively thin out the white nativeborn population. Macron, meanwhile, has been criticised for pandering to right-wing concerns over immigration and Islam, while pursuing economic reforms that have alienated the left.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe moral of Macron\u2019s re-election is that in class-ridden societies, the left-right division remains essential,\u201d wrote Greek leftist politician Yanis Varoufakis. \u201cWhen centrist politicians succeed in obscuring it, they get caught in a dynamic feedback loop with the ultra-right that makes them sound shriller and more irrational, while making the ultra-right seem deceptively more palatable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rahman of Eurasia Group counters that, despite this \u201cmove to the extremes\u201d, there remains \u201ca lot of potential in the French centre\u201d \u2013 not just in Macron\u2019s own party, but a host of other smaller factions that the president may count as allies. But, first, they have to get elected to Parliament.<\/p>\n
* Tharoor is a columnist on the foreign desk of The Washington Post, where he writes the Today\u2019s WorldView newsletter and column.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ishaan Tharoor France\u2019s presidential election is over, but the battle is just beginning. After securing another five-year term in Sunday\u2019s second-round vote, President Emmanuel Macron now braces for the coming legislative elections in June. The centrist leader\u2019s opponents, including the defeated far-right leader Marine Le Pen, have vowed to carry on the battle, and may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":80273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[11483,5868,12055,7912],"class_list":["post-80272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","tag-europes","tag-halts","tag-macrons","tag-victory"],"yoast_head":"\n