French President-elect Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech at his campaign headquarters after early results in the second round in the 2017 French presidential election in Paris, France, May 7, 2017. REUTERS/Lionel Bonaventure/PoolPOOL/Reuters
President-elect Emmanuel Macron of France has already had an extraordinary political career, and he has only just been elected for the first time.
Mr. Macron beat Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National in a run-off election Sunday, and he did so by stepping into a dangerous political vacuum. The familiar conventional party organizations were out of the running, especially after François Fillon, the leader of the old-guard Republicans, was knocked out of the running in the first round by an embarrassing scandal. Only Ms. Le Pen seemed to be on the rise.
The little-known Mr. Macron stepped into the breach as a centrist. A technocrat and former economy minister with business-friendly views, he represented a relatively fresh style and youthfulness, as well as moderate and sensible positions that were reassuring to a country that did not want to elect a president with far-right pedigree. His victory is a testament to talent, luck and the ability to seize an opportunity.
Now, however, Mr. Macron needs all his talents, and maybe more luck, to govern effectively. He needs to form some sort of coalition of moderate, liberal and conservative politicians – many of them old hacks previously opposed to each other in the French National Assembly, and many of them older than the president-elect himself.
He also has to find and appoint a new prime minister. His prospective parliamentary coalition will go under the name The Republic on the Move – a name combination that smartly suggests traditional French politics and Mr. Macron's own energy, but nonetheless a party with no parliamentary seats.
He must also take care to remember that the troubles that Ms. Le Pen, as well as the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, emphasized in the election campaign are very real in France – youth unemployment, the continuing decay of aging industries and the tenuous assimilation of many Muslim immigrants, among them.
Still, Mr. Macron's presidential victory is encouraging for France, Europe and the Western world, and a welcome blow to the extremist forces blowing across the world right now.