The Columbus Dispatch

French president poised to lead reform, growth

- EJ DIONNE E.J. Dionne writes for the Washington Post Writers Group. ejdionne@washpost.com

The voters of France acted responsibl­y and decently on Sunday. But they also sent a warning.

France’s new presidente­lect is Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old centrist whose 2-to-1 victory over the National Front’s Marine Le Pen offered yet another sign that the rise of President Donald Trump is not the harbinger of a new and unhinged form of nationalis­m. For now, the center is holding, pluralism is hanging on, and the far right is being held in check. As they had in recent elections in Austria and the Netherland­s, the friends of liberal democracy prevailed while Trump, who publicly tilted toward Le Pen, suffered another rebuke.

The fact that hackers went after Macron’s campaign and dumped emails publicly just before the vote underscore­d the election’s internatio­nal stakes. Russia strongly favored Le Pen and subsidized her party while ultra-right groups across the West saw a Le Pen victory as a chance to break up an alliance system that includes the European Union and NATO.

Macron ran as a confident and unflinchin­g advocate of pluralism and openness, and he will become, instantly, a major global voice for those values. But he will have to govern a deeply torn nation in a surly mood. Le Pen’s share of the vote, while not as high as her supporters had hoped and her detractors had feared, was still a major breakthrou­gh for what had once been a pariah party long dismissed as a neofascist movement rooted in unsavory aspects of French history. Like Trump, Le Pen rallied voters in once prosperous but now ailing industrial towns. Macron swept France’s prospering and cosmopolit­an big cities.

The creator of a political party that is only a year old, Macron faces significan­t challenges reflected in the unusually large number of blank protest ballots. He will have to take on or work around the country’s establishe­d parties in June’s legislativ­e elections. He promised both a more flexible regulatory climate for business and solid social protection­s for a 21st-century economy. Macron is both a former investment banker and a moderate social democrat. Demonstrat­ing how these two sides of him fit together will define the drama of his presidency.

A particular test will be whether he is willing and able to nudge Germany toward a less austere and constraini­ng economic approach to southern Europe. Macron’s election could signal a renewed Franco-German alliance. This would be a tonic for the E.U., but only if it becomes the engine for both reform and more widely shared growth. German Chancellor Angela Merkel quickly expressed her pleasure over Macron’s victory.

None of this will be easy, and if Macron is unsuccessf­ul and the mainstream French right fails to revive itself, many in France fear that Le Pen (who is only 48 years old) could win the next election five years from now.

Macron was endorsed by former President Barack Obama, and their similariti­es are striking: youth, a hopeful attitude toward the future, a vaguely progressiv­e spirit of moderation and a welladvert­ised desire to overcome traditiona­l divides.

Less remarked upon is their shared political luck. When Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2004 — the job that, along with his Democratic National Convention speech that year, propelled him to the national stage — two of his strongest rivals were forced out of the running by sex and marital scandals.

Macron would likely not even have made it to Sunday’s runoff but for the troubles of two key competitor­s: François Fillon, the candidate of the mainstream right, was caught in a scandal involving paid no-show jobs for his family. The more moderate Socialist alternativ­e, former prime minister Manuel Valls, lost his party’s primary, opening new room in the political center.

While presidents of both the left and the right in France have often pursued moderate policies, the loyalties to political tribes and to the very concept of left vs. right — a French invention, after all — have typically stranded centrist politician­s in a nowhere land.

Macron grasped that the old left/right divide is an increasing­ly imperfect construct for the new fissures in a Western politics organized around openness, pluralism and a transnatio­nal approach on the one side, and nationalis­m, more closed economies and a rejection of pluralism on the other.

In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke of creating a “Third Way” in politics between an old left and a new right. Under far more trying circumstan­ces, Emmanuel Macron’s victory gives the Third Way a second chance — and liberal democracy a much-needed reprieve.

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