Pedro González
Journalist
French voters once again voted with their heads in the second round of the presidential elections, once they had already done so with their viscera in the first, and gave their trust to Emmanuel Macron for a new five-year term in the Elysee Palace. His victory over the national-populist candidate Marine Le Pen shows the fracture of the country, where the entire human landscape that makes it up has undergone a profound transformation.
The stability-uncertainty antagonism; rich-poor; city-countryside; educated-illiterate (even digital); civil servants and fixed income workers unemployed and with no prospects, draws the broad outlines of the fracture, which the redirected president will have to heal and suture.
The whole of the European Union breathes, for which France’s contribution to the gigantic construction project is simply fundamental, so much so that if Le Pen had triumphed and consequently implemented his programme, the EU would definitely have gone down in history as a great dream sadly frustrated.
However, if Macron’s victory in these elections became imperative, this was nothing more than the sine qua non condition to tackle what is going to be a truly mammoth task. And the first step will be to verify in the legislative elections next June, the true third round of these presidential elections, how far the populism installed on both sides of Macron’s liberal centrism reaches. Because, both to the right and to the left of La República en Marcha (LRM), the parties that guaranteed moderation and alternation have disappeared, both the Republicans (LR) and the Socialist Party (PSF).
From both radical extremes now on the rise, the leader of the Untamed France Jean-Luc Mélenchon even aspires to win the legislative elections, to the point of having warned Macron that in that case he will demand that he be appointed prime minister. It would be a scenario of unsustainable confrontation, not for assuming a president-prime minister cohabitation, whose stormy precedent with François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac would now be seen as a raft of oil and would not resemble the hypothetical between Macron and Mélenchon at all, such is the abyss on essential issues that separates the projects of both, starting with the EU, since in this chapter the rebel has the same desire as Le Pen to blow it up.
Putin, the other loser in the French elections
Macron has little time to undertake his program of postponed or half-finished reforms, but above all he has barely a month and a half to convince, even if it is those who have voted for him now with a covered nose or according to the theory of least possible harm, that it can truly open a door to hope for them. It will not be easy at all, since even a people as rationalist as the French have settled into a kind of eternal discontent (la malaise), a constant complaint that also acts as a barrier to attempts to modernize structures and institutions.
It is easy to exacerbate the spirits of the most rancid nationalism by appealing to past glories and greatness, and pointing to the foreigner or the immigrant as the obstacle that prevents the reissue of imperial splendors. That is why Macron will have to show off his accredited skills of persuasion to form a team with the most valuable and usable of the terminated socialism and neo-Gaullism, and effectively demonstrate that France will be European and an essential engine of the EU or it will not be.
In addition to Le Pen’s defeat, another loser must also be registered in the French presidential elections. It is Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, who has not been able to bring into the Elysee what was clearly going to be his Trojan horse to blow up the EU, whose Twenty-seven members are becoming increasingly aware that the imperialist will of the Kremlin It would not be satisfied with the Donbass and the entire southern fringe of Ukraine, not even with imposing its dictatorial and criminal will on the already devastated and martyred Ukraine.
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