What the commentators said
Sunday’s vote was reassuring in many ways, said Mary Dejevsky in The Independent. The FN may have secured its best ever result in a presidential election, but Le Pen didn’t top the poll, as many had feared. Indeed, she only received a few percentage points more than her father did in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, before he went on to be thrashed by Jacques Chirac. This despite the fact that France has suffered a recent rash of terrorist attacks, the latest of which came just last week when a policeman was killed on the Champs-élysées in Paris ( see page 7). It suggests there’s a fairly low ceiling of support for France’s far-right.
It’s too early to celebrate, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. Le Pen is a “skilled television debater”, and Macron – as a wealthy ex-banker who served for two years as Hollande’s finance minister – is “vulnerable to being portrayed as a member of the out-of-touch elite”. What’s more, even if Macron does win, it’s far from clear that he’ll be able to deliver the modernising reforms he has promised. “Breaking France out of a cycle of low growth, high unemployment and rising debt has proved beyond a succession of ostensibly reformist presidents – including Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and even the current president, François Hollande.”
Macron doesn’t have a great track record so far, said Matthew Lynn in The Daily Telegraph. His reforms as finance minister were “almost comically timid”. They included deregulating long-distance buses and slightly loosening up Sunday shopping hours – but only for stores in “tourist areas”. Macron’s main problem, said Harry de Quetteville in the same paper, is that “he literally has no MPS”. Even assuming his party wins many seats in June’s parliamentary elections, En Marche! is unlikely to be the biggest bloc in parliament. So he’ll need support from rivals to pass any measures. “That is not a recipe for getting things done.” Much will depend on the response of the main parties, agreed Aline-florence Manent in The Spectator. “If they aren’t prepared to ditch the sterile power play of alternating centre-right vs. centre-left majorities – and compromise – France faces an uncertain future.”