France has dodged a bullet. A fresh, young, pro-European Union candidate has beaten off the forces of reaction and will almost certainly win the election for the presidency. What a relief! The stock markets are happy. The Eurocrats are happy. The EU is safe, for now.
Well, don't relax just yet. The real news is that the French political establishment has been decisively repudiated. For the first time in history, neither of the two finalists for president is from a major party. François Hollande, perhaps the most loathed man in France, is slinking out of office with a popularity rating that's been as low as 4 per cent. The first-round winner, Emmanuel Macron, heads a brand-new party that has no seats in the National Assembly. Anti-European populists got more than 40 per cent of the vote. This news is as seismic as Brexit and Donald Trump.
In the run-up to the election, leading foreign journalists who know the country well found no reason to be cheerful. France's proud old industrial cities have turned to rust. The suburbs of Paris have turned into jihadi factories, and integration has been a failure. France's inflexible welfare state cannot create jobs for the natives, never mind the newcomers.
French election: Macron, Le Pen to face off in second round of voting on May 7
"France has in effect made a structural choice for unemployment," Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times. "Reform is … elusive because nobody wants to give up their 'acquis' [benefits]." He found plenty of people who aren't too badly off by objective measures, but are so mad they just want to break stuff. If the U.S. media had turned the same searching eye on their own country, fewer people would have been surprised by Mr. Trump.
As in other Western nations, the old political fault lines have disintegrated. The new fault line is between globalization's winners and losers. The prosperous, cosmopolitan urban elites and the less mobile, less educated folks who are stuck in the stagnating hinterland live in two different worlds – just as they do in Britain and the United States.
The leading chronicler of this new divide is an urban geographer named Christophe Guilluy, who wrote a wildly popular book called Le Crépuscule de la France d'en haut (The Twilight of Elite France). Here's what he had to say this weekend in the Guardian: "The globalized model … primarily based on an international division of labour, creates substantial wealth but does nothing to bond society as a whole. The job market has become deeply polarized and mainly concentrated in big cities, squeezing out the middle classes. For the first time in history, working people no longer live in the places where jobs and wealth are created."
Can one neophyte 39 year old transform a nation – especially one that's under near-constant terrorist attack? That will be tough. Perhaps the biggest obstacle of all is a cultural malaise that has enveloped the natural ruling classes and left them dispirited and depressed. I'm reminded of a young Canadian friend who spent some time working at a top law firm in Paris, where she met many successful, young French men. I asked her what they were like. "They're so morose!" she said.
In many Western nations, democratic capitalism seems to have reached a sclerotic stage – unable to summon a vision of national greatness that can unite people, incapable of addressing the economic problems that have undone the old working class, and fatally slow to acknowledge cultural resentments and the challenges of immigration and multiculturalism.
A widely cited anecdote from Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed 2016 Campaign, serves as a metaphor for the incumbent class. No matter how hard they tried, her campaign staff couldn't solve one fundamental problem: Why did she want to be president? "Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn't really have a rationale," the authors write. The same can be said for the entire Democratic Party, and for the old-line parties of France and many other Western nations. Other than their own sense of entitlement, they can't explain why they should lead us. These days, it's the populist authoritarians who have all the energy.
Not all the Western democracies are in the grips of a populist insurgency. Prosperous Germany is a notable exception. Prosperous Canada is another – for now, anyway. But in an age of disruption, the past doesn't necessarily tell you much about the future. Personally, I'm still worried about France. The cheese is still divine, though.