Macron Crushes Le Pen In French Elections

French media is reporting that Emmanuel Macron has won the French election and hopefully has destroyed the momentum of the nativist, populist revolt that has dominated recent elections. If the reports are to be believed, Macron demolished Marine Le Pen by a 30 point margin, 65% to 35%. In addition, the participation rate was much higher than expected, running anywhere between 75% and 80%.

While this is a massive repudiation of Le Pen’s anti-EU, nativist, racist, and xenophobic campaign.  Le Pen and her National Front will still be a force in French politics but certainly this election has taken the wind out of her sails. For Macron, although he has promised to structurally reform the French economy, his biggest challenge will be to actually reform the structural problems with the EU. Any action on that front, however, will probably have to wait until after the German elections for that process to begin, if it ever does. If Macron does not eventually get the EU to confront those issues, he will end up in the same place as Hollande and further empower the National Front and Le Pen.

Considering what was at stake, this was a huge victory for traditional liberal values and at least the short term stability of Europe. But the issues, especially the economic ones, that have driven the rise in the popularity of the National Front and Le Pen will still need to be addressed.

As a side note, I wonder if the last-minute release of documents hacked from the Macron campaign actually backfired in this case, driving voters who might have abstained to the polls as a simple act of resisting another attack on democracy. It will be interesting to see if there is any evidence for that.

Vive La France!