THE election of Emmanuel Macron as France’s new president may have brought much relief all across the globe, but such relief may turn out to be ephemeral at best.
In the wake of the election of Donald Trump as United States president and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the last thing the world needs will be another destabilising political outcome from an election in another major Western country.
And, this year’s French presidential election had threatened to turn into another populist surge, sweeping the far-right politician Marine Le Pen into power. The final round of the vote was between her and Macron, who made it this far only because he was perceived to be a political outsider and had to set up his own political party to stake his claim on the Elysee Palace.
As it turned out, all the candidates from France’s traditional political parties did not make it to the final round of voting. Macron’s eventual victory was possible not so much because French voters favoured him as they were opposed to the political extreme Le Pen is still regarded as having posed.
Thus, Macron’s win was anything but a French reaffirmation of the post-World War 2 political status quo. The upheaval wreaking havoc on politics across the West shows little sign of abating. Having won elected office for the very first time, the 39-year- old new French president may only be just beginning to realise how challenging it will be navigating through such seismic political turbulence.
The youthful Macron’s election is being compared to the ascendancy of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was to the latter, after all, that the observation was attributed that when China eventually reawakened from its centuries-old slumber, it would ultimately shake the world. Macron is, therefore, both France’s political manifestation of the global whiplash from China’s earth-shaking reawakening, as well as the shoulders upon which French voters have entrusted the task of adjusting to China’s rise.
If anti-globalisation is today the overriding populist impulse raging through much of the Western world, China is its proximate cause and one that — given the country’s outsized heft — is likely to be irreversible and only marginally susceptible to any meaningful resistance.
For, upheaval in Western politics, as it is in most other parts of the globe, is often and usually but a mere reflection of upheaval in the economic realm. Much as the grim desolation of America’s so-called “rust belt” turned desperate voters to Trump in a breath-taking rejection of politics-as- usual, French voters in the country’s rural heartlands are similarly disenchanted with traditional politicians and political parties and easing the Trump-like unlikely rise of Macron.
But, whereas Trump is playing out the part of the political insurgent even after winning the US presidency, Macron is seeking out something eminently more thoughtful if perhaps even more ambitious: remaking the centre of French politics in his own image.
But, can the Western democracies, sustained on the fat of colonial and new-world possessions which made possible the last great economic globalisation, niftily go about reinventing themselves in the current globalisation era to be led by China?
In France’s case, much depends on whether Macron can pull off something akin to what Margaret Thatcher did in Britain: the brutal cutting down to size of a political and socio-economic construct beholden to organised labour.
The Thatcher “revolution”, in any case, was achieved in a political environment far less febrile than in much of the West today, and Thatcher was backed up by the British Conservative Party, preeminent then as it is today.
Macron, on the other hand, has first to build his new political party and ensure the momentum of his own victory is translated into victory for his party in upcoming legislative elections. Only then will it be possible for the new president to attempt to forge a new political and economic consensus.
And, even if Macron succeeds in all of the above, ever diminished circumstances may still await the average French citizen as they have confronted Britons in a post-Thatcher Britain. Ever more cutbacks in social benefits may still await Britons over the longer term despite the economic gains afforded by Thatcher’s economic reforms.
France has still not confronted the upheavals of the Thatcher years and its social-welfare state is on a far grander scale than anything Britons had been used to. Postponing the politically difficult and economically inevitable have led France to today’s critical juncture. Much indeed rests on Macron’s shoulders.
JOHN TEO views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak.