Has France found its Tony Blair?

If enthusiasm is any guide to electoral success, said Olivier Pirot in La Nouvelle République (Tours), Emmanuel Macron could be France’s next president. Last year, when President Hollande’s popular young economy minister made his own bid for power by founding a new centrist movement, En Marche! (Forward!), it was widely predicted his bubble would burst. Instead polls show him snapping at the heels of the two front runners, the right-wing Republican François Fillon and the far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen. In any other era, a new party trying to reach the second round would be “mission impossible”. But, just as new parties have risen in Spain, Italy and elsewhere, it could now happen.

Macron is startling in another respect, said Darko Janjevic in Deutsche Welle (Berlin). He’s fluent in English. Most French presidents have barely managed a few, heavily accented, phrases. (“Be proud of you,” Hollande declaimed in one speech, “because you can be… do what we want to do.”) Conservatives were scandalised when Macron recently gave a lengthy speech at Berlin’s Humboldt University entirely in English. He did so because he was addressing a European audience, said Robert Zaretsky in the Chicago Tribune. In “crisp, compelling” language, he argued for “more Europe, not less”. He’s an “unapologetic liberal” who wants to do away with de Gaulle’s “dirigiste” state; and unlike Le Pen and Fillon – both “unforgiving” to France’s immigrants – he wants to “galvanise compassion” for refugees, whom he views as an “economic opportunity”. It’s easy to see his appeal to people worried both about their job prospects and rising nationalism. His Berlin speech made clear that he’s “the last great French hope” for a European future based on core values.

Having ignored Macron, Le Pen is now demonising him as the “candidate of Brussels and globalism”, said Rémi Duchemin on Europe1.fr (Paris). But he’s getting support from key economists and major figures such as former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, who know the Left is too unpopular to stand a chance. There’s even talk of the socialist candidate standing aside to make way for him. Yet Macron’s refusal to align with either Right or Left leaves voters confused, said Vassili Joannidès de Lautour in Les Échos (Paris). And without an established party, he can’t rely on MPS and mayors to amplify his message. Another political maverick, Jean-pierre Chevènement, stood in the 2002 election as a “left-wing nationalist” and bombed. That’s likely to be Macron’s fate too.