Why Macron's re-election matters to world

By Andrew Hammond

It was not just much of the French populace which held its breath Sunday as the presidential election saw incumbent Emmanuel Macron beat off the right-wing challenge of Marine Le Pen.

While Macron won comfortably in the end, becoming the first president to be re-elected for some two decades, he now faces his toughest challenge yet amidst a record-high abstention rate of almost 30 percent, and lower support than in 2017. At stake is not just the future direction of the eurozone's second-largest economy but also wider governance too in the only EU state with a U.N. Security Council veto, plus nuclear weapons.

With Macron winning out, there could now be significant change on the horizon, both in foreign and domestic policy. For instance, a second term for the young liberal spells the growing likelihood of increased cooperation with the EU on issues such as Schengen and eurozone reform.

Moreover, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the recent AUKUS spat with the United Kingdom, United States and Australia, security and defense will also be key ― especially with a new German government with a similar policy orientation. Under Macron's presidency, France's defense spending has already risen by 7 billion euros with a target to raise it to 2 percent of gross domestic product. In his second term, Macron will want to build up a significantly stronger, joint European response to head off wider Russian threats.

Outside of these first-order policy issues, there is wider international political symbolism in Macron's victory. For the stand-off between the liberal, centrist and his nationalist, far-right opponent was watched closely globally too given its potential ramifications beyond the continent.

While it is very concerning that support for Le Pen was well over 40 percent on Sunday, Macron's second term has nonetheless defied the march of conservative populism in many industrialized countries. For years, it has been populists who made the running across much of the world revolting against the political center ground.

His victory therefore underlines, yet again, that the political center ground can still potentially hold out against conservative, anti-establishment forces despite the populist mood in much of the world. Moreover, his success may offer lessons to other leftist and centrist politicians in coming years.

What Macron's victory appears to underline is that politicians of the center ground benefit electorally from having an optimistic, forward-looking vision for tackling complex, long-term policy challenges like stagnant living standards, to help build public consensus and confidence around solutions to them. France has been suffering from economic pain for years as shown not just in the more than 40 percent of voters opting for far-right Le Pen on Sunday, but also the over 20 percent voting for the far left in the first-round ballot earlier this month.

Tackling tough-to-solve, first-order challenges in this context is a significant hurdle that centrist politicians across much of the world are widely perceived to have failed on, helping give rise to perceptions of a broken process and that democracy itself is failing.

The perceived failure of conventional politics, of course, created not just the political window of opportunity for Macron, but also Le Pen too with the simplistic agendas she and other populist politicians often champion. Contrary to what some of this ilk assert, there is no "silver bullet" agenda that can address, overnight, complex challenges such as stagnant living standards.

Instead, long-term, concerted efforts are needed to better address these issues in what may be a generational effort. As Macron appears to appreciate, such an agenda can move towards demonstrating more effectively how a fair, inclusive democratic politics can help overcome or ameliorate the challenges that many people are experiencing in the world today.

However, if Macron fails to make ground on this agenda, Le Pen (or another right-wing populist such as Eric Zemmour) could yet spring a surprise in 2027 or later that would rock the political mainstream. On Sunday, Zemmour said it is "not inevitable" that the forces of nationalism lose every election and called for a "grand union" of the far right ahead of the 2027 presidential ballot which Macron cannot contest given the two-term limit.

The shock of such a far-right presidential victory in 2027 would be huge, potentially reshaping France's post-war identity. While Le Pen claims no longer to support Frexit (France's departure from the eurozone and wider EU), she and Zemmour are unapologetic pro-Putin, Euroskeptic populists, even questioning the need for NATO asserting that it exists to serve U.S. objectives in Europe, and calling instead for closer ties with Russia.

So the fact that the far right remains so strong underlines that its political defeat cannot be taken for granted in the future given the spread of anti-establishment politics in Western democracies. Macron's second term could now therefore be key in determining the longer-term direction of the nation in the generation to come.

Andrew Hammond (andrewkorea@outlook.com) is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.