President-elect Emmanuel Macron and outgoing French President Francois Hollande mark western allies' WW2 victory in Europe, Arc De Triomphe, Paris, May 8, 2017. Pool/Press Association. All rights reserved.The election of a 39-year old president represents no less than a sea change in a country as traditional as France. The country of the French Revolution, the Motherland of Human Rights, as the French love to call their nation, remains unwilling and uneasy confronted by inexorable change. Blocked by her own contradictions between lofty but too often unrealistic ideals and the hard realities – whether economic and social – of an unavoidable globalisation, France has too often chosen to close her eyes, to delude herself, preferring day dreamers or populists promising better futures or revolution, whether of left or right, but far too often at the extremes.
Here in France, the power of the word remains mightier than the sword. Hence the popular success of three of the four major contenders to the recent French presidential election, extreme left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, extreme right Marine Le Pen and progressive centrist newcomer Emmanuel Macron who was elected on Sunday May 7. Against all odds for a man hardly known one year ago, and without the backing of a traditional party in a country where his main rivals have been in politics for 30 years or more, if not for two generations, Macron has benefited from his rivals’ mistakes, starting with the leader of the Republican right, François Fillon, taken for granted as the next president until the moment when it was revealed that he was compulsively addicted to money.
