Macron’s problems really start after election win

Emmanuel Macron’s victory in last weekend’s French presidential election is good news for the European Union and, of course, for France itself. In a choice between continuity or chaos, the French chose with a larger majority than expected for continuity and thus for a future at the heart of European cooperation. 58.5 percent to national populist Marine Le Pen is less tight than polls warned beforehand. Macron became the first president since Jacques Chirac in 2002 to win a second term as head of state. In the turbulent French politics of recent years, this is an achievement not to be underestimated.

Still, Macron fits some modesty. Nearly a third of French people stayed at home on Sunday or voted blank. In absolute numbers, he received more than two million fewer votes than five years ago. Le Pen just got about two and a half million votes. The realignment of the political landscape unleashed by the social-liberal Macron in 2017 has de facto weakened the political center and strengthened the extremes, as the first round of elections on April 10 showed. It often declared obsolete front republicain, with the French using the runoff election to cut off radical candidates, was desperately needed to reverse a populist victory. Once again, many people voted against their will to avoid worse. The question is how long this system will still work in the current era.

But the lack of enthusiasm does not make Macron’s victory any less legitimate, as some critics have seemed to suggest. Whoever gets the most votes has won – even in a two-round electoral system that is sometimes perceived as unsatisfactory. But the result obliges Macron to reach out to those who did not vote for him as “president of all French,” he said. How he the fracture social, the social divide, without jeopardizing its own reform agenda is just not so easy to imagine. Macron’s problems are only just beginning.

After the first round, he already plagued left-wing voters with the promise that his prime minister, who is to be appointed this week, will personally manage the environment and climate portfolio. More difficult is his recent commitment to raise the minimum retirement age not to 65 but to 64. To keep the French social model affordable, more radical adjustments are actually needed. But they are bound to lead to mass demonstrations that could cripple the rest of his presidency.

Macron’s room for maneuver is in any case limited in view of the parliamentary elections on 12 and 19 June. A majority like in 2017 is not very realistic: his party, La République en Marche, failed to organize a solid local anchorage or attract appealing faces in five years. It is not without reason that the hard-left ex-presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon launched the campaign on Sunday for what he calls the “third round of elections”. With a left-wing majority in parliament, preferably with him as prime minister, he wants to change Macron’s course.

A stronger parliament, in which the government must look for majorities, could force Macron to adopt a less vertical style of government. To make the “new era” he announced a little less like the old will be necessary to narrow the gap between the two Frances that surfaced on Sunday. But it is primarily up to Macron himself to ensure that his country does not find itself in the same democratically unsatisfactory and stability-threatening situation again in five years’ time as it has been in the past two weeks.