If Macron can win in France, there’s hope for a moderate U.S. president

Great Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the United States’ election of Donald Trump last year represented such blanket rejections of establishment conventional wisdom that many observers are seeing the results of Sunday’s first round of the French presidential election as a welcome return to normalcy in the Western world.

Last week, it seemed possible that the outcome would be a May 7 runoff pitting far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon against Marine Le Pen of the hard-right, harshly anti-immigrant National Front. Instead, the runoff will pit Le Pen against heavily favored Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old former economic minister who finished first after running as a moderate who could hold France together.

But Macron’s success isn’t a reflection of satisfaction with French establishment politics. He ran as the leader of a brand new party and found success because, as a recent analysis in The New York Times noted, “France’s two major parties, on the right and the left, are in self-inflicted ruin.”

After decades of economic stagnation and heavy youth unemployment, and an increasingly fraught relationship between Muslim residents and French society, “it is hardly surprising that French voters want to throw the bums out,” The Economist observed. “Both Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen tap into that frustration.”

As noted by Christophe Guilluy — a French intellectual consulted by French leaders of all ideological stripes — France, like America and Britain, is roiled by economic inequality driven by globalization that has concentrated economic gains among a relative handful of people. The economic have-nots, meanwhile, resent elites and at times minorities as well. Macron, while rejecting the white nationalism and isolationism of Le Pen, presented himself as deeply sympathetic to the have-nots’ concerns.

Could his rapid rise offer a lesson for U.S. politics about the attractiveness of moderation in an era of polarization? Perhaps. America is now two decades into a poisonous media-driven cycle in which many conservatives and liberals grow ever more contemptuous of each other. On the right, the tea party movement has been as bent on discarding Republican moderates as it was in trying to undermine and belittle President Obama and other leading Democrats. On the left, especially since Trump’s surprise election, there seems such an eagerness to war with the president that in the process his tens of millions of supporters still get dismissed as “deplorables.”

The result? Political parties which have little or no crossover appeal — and even turn off many of their own members. A weekend poll in The Washington Post found 62 percent of Americans — and 30 percent of Republicans — thought the Republican Party was out of touch with the concerns of most people. The same poll found 67 percent of Americans — and 44 percent of Democrats — thought the Democratic Party was similarly out of touch.

In less polarized times in 1992, a billionaire who ran as an independent can-do moderate (Ross Perot) got 19 percent of the presidential vote. In 2020, it’s not hard to imagine a wealthy Macron type, also running as an independent can-do moderate, getting twice that much support — and winning.

Many Americans are polarized. But others want to elect someone who can meet them in the middle.

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