Although Emmanuel Macron did a little better than expected in the first round of the French presidential election last Sunday, the results were not a huge surprise. The second round next Sunday will be between Macron and the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, exactly as it was five years ago. But the results confirmed two worrying trends in French politics that were already apparent – and which are also evident to some extent across much of the rest of continental Europe.
The first is the realignment of politics away from a fault line between left and right, to one between “radical” centrism and populism. The centre-left Socialist and centre-right Les Républicains candidates both received less than 5% of the vote, a lower share of the vote than either of these parties had ever received before. Both Macron and Le Pen see themselves as being “beyond left and right” – that is, though they both want us to think of them as being opposites, they actually mirror each other. From a democratic point of view, this realignment is disastrous.
