Emmanuel Macron has done it again. His re-election as President of France for a second term, with 58.8% of the vote to the far right’s Marine Le Pen’s 41.2% has caused a palpable sigh of relief all across Europe. The continent’s leaders as well as ruling politicians beyond Europe have lost little time in congratulating Macron, clearly in the feeling that the broad European community is safe from rightwing populism for the next five years. The spectre, at one point, of Le Pen entering the Elysee as France’s new leader sent shivers of worry in the West. The reason was unmistakable: Le Pen’s politics, directed at immigrants and based on xenophobia and antithetical to the EU and NATO threatened to undermine the balance which has held Europe together.
Macron’s victory has kept all those threats at bay. But note that even as Le Pen has lost, her share of the vote has registered a jump from the 33%-plus she obtained in her earlier presidential run against Macron five years ago. That sends out the worrying, if the not the chilling, message that the French far right, typified by Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, is making steady inroads in the country’s political consciousness. Small wonder, then, that in his victory speech at the Eiffel Tower, Macron attempted to reach out to all the people of France. He would like those who supported Le Pen to engage with him in a new enterprise for the country. He recognized that many of those whose support catapulted him to a second term had in reality voted not for him per se but against Le Pen. That was realism at work in Macron, as also in his acknowledgement that there were those who did not vote at all. A whopping 28%-plus of the French electorate chose to stay away from the polling centres.
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That was voter apathy, a key reason why in his new term in office President Macron will need to convince the French people that he can end up being a leader who can bring about substantive change. The economy will call for hard and difficult tackling; the issue of immigrants cannot be pushed under the rug; those at the lowest rung of the economy will require attending to. And then, of course, there is the matter of how President Macron now approaches the Ukraine issue. Prior to the election on Sunday, he busily engaged in diplomatic moves to ensure that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not send his troops rushing into Ukraine. Even after Moscow launched its assault on Kyiv, Macron thought diplomacy had a chance.
The president’s re-election has now reopened the doors to a fresh new exercise of diplomacy over the Ukraine question. Macron is certainly no Charles de Gaulle, but his preoccupation with setting up France as a global power approximates the vision which the founder of the Fifth Republic shaped in the years he held office between 1958 and 1969. The idea of French grandeur, as demonstrated on the international stage, is tempting for Emmanuel Macron. In his new term, the idea will take on greater meaning, for the good reason that in the Ukraine conflict, France’s has been a cautious voice. Of course, Macron has been disappointed by Putin, but he remains one European politician who can yet bring his influence to bear on Russia’s hard-nosed leader. And, yes, with new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Macron can redefine European priorities in the coming years.
At home, though, Macron’s legacy will depend largely on the extent to which he can push back on rising far right sentiments in France. His presidency should not end on a lackluster note.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer