Work, Mr. Macron, Work

Can a graduate of France’s elite schools, a onetime investment banker and the former economy minister of an unpopular Socialist president prevail at a time of French disgust with politics-as-usual?

I ask the question because the greatest danger to Emmanuel Macron, at once the fresh face of French politics and a familiar product of the French system, is the assumption that his first-round electoral victory makes triumph in the second round inevitable.

It is not. Macron, a political neophyte, has work to do.

Marine Le Pen, who took 21.4 percent of the first-round vote to Macron’s 23.9 percent, is not the favorite, but she is plausible in a way her father Jean-Marie Le Pen was not when he was crushed in the second round of the 2002 election. Some 7.6 million French people voted for her, 2.8 million more than her father in the first round 15 years ago. Never before has the National Front, a racist party, taken more than 20 percent of the vote. That this result for Le Pen has provoked relief in some circles is a measure of her party’s steady advance.

Disruption is in the air, and Le Pen’s anti-immigrant, anti-European, nationalist agitation is its most powerful expression. The establishment parties of center-left and center-right have been blown away, and with them some of the essential fabric of the Fifth Republic.

This same establishment’s calls now to throw up the Republic’s rampart against a xenophobic party issued from the cesspool of Vichy Fascism are sincere but no longer determinant. Macron will have to win this on May 7, not expect Le Pen to lose it. The fracture between globalized metropoles and depressed regions that produced political upheaval in Britain and the United States applies equally to France. Paris gave Le Pen less than 5 percent of the vote; in the struggling east of the country she thrived. Macron has to erect a barrier against the prevailing global cultural upheaval. For France and for Europe, it is critical he does. The European Union can survive a British exit; it will buckle under a French exit.

We know the drumbeat of the next few days. Le Pen will attack Macron as the puppet of the man he served, President François Hollande. She will attack him as the Rothschild banker, the man of “the system,” the elitist and the globalist. She will attempt to exploit the same diffuse anger, resentment and anxiety that produced Brexit and President Donald Trump. She will work on fertile ground; nobody does malaise like the French. Russia, intent on undermining the European Union, will help her where it can.

Some 41 percent of French voters of the extreme right and far left voted for candidates favoring a possible exit from the European Union and rejection of the euro. On the left, that candidate was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose “Unbowed France” movement gained almost 20 percent of the vote. Mélenchon has not yet urged his supporters to stop Le Pen. Many will abstain; some may even vote for her. Extremes do converge. Add to this the defection to Le Pen of the more right-wing supporters of the conservative François Fillon: the threat to Macron becomes clear.

Polls, which were accurate on the first round, show Macron with a clear lead over Le Pen. Macron’s worst enemy would be arrogance. Where Hillary Clinton paid little or no attention to the reasons for Bernie Sanders’s popularity, Macron will have to reckon with the Mélenchon factor.

When I was in France in March I listened in some wonder as Macron declared: “Modernity is disruptive and I endorse that.” Bracing and brave words, like his emotional support for the European Union and empathy with refugees. But it is preservation of the French welfare state, the construction of a “social Europe” and the fight against inequality that Mélenchon supporters focus on. More than any other Western industrialized nation, France has philosophical objections to 21st- century capitalism. Macron will have to temper his innovative, tech-friendly, free-market instincts with a heavy dose of Gallic solidarity. That will be a delicate balancing act.

Macron, 39, has managed it up to now, conjuring a new movement from nothing in the space of a year. That’s a tribute to his ability to embody renewal and hope despite attempts to portray him as merely young. Now comes his, and the French Republic’s, supreme challenge.

The French economic model amounts to a structural choice for high unemployment in exchange for comprehensive social protection. Everyone knows that; nobody has been able to change it. In some measure this impasse explains French anger. The young can’t find work. There’s a feeling of being stuck. Insecurity has exacerbated that frustration, as has the breakdown of the model that integrated generations of immigrants. Le Pen has the facile, vile answers to all this. Macron has the genuine ambition, as he put it to me, to “transform” France “at its deepest level.”

Europe and France need him. His mantra now must be: work, boldness, humility.