THE centre did hold after all. The election of Emmanuel Macron as President of France has huge implications for Brexit and for Scotland. His decisive victory over the National Front’s Marine Le Pen is not just a defeat for the far right, though it clearly is that. Macron confirms two important trends. The first is that the march of the new post-liberal right, that began with Brexit and spread to America with Donald Trump, has been halted – for now – at the English Channel. The right-wing populist Geert Wilders in the Netherlands was a loser in March as was Austria’s Norbert Hofer in December. In Germany, which goes to the polls in September, the Alternative For Deutschland is losing ground rapidly. French voters looked at the alternative for France, and said a decisive “Non!”.
The second is that the European Union, far from falling apart in the aftershock of Brexit, is getting more united by the week. Mr Macron is a mercurial political character, with few fixed policies, rather like Tony Blair, but he is undoubtedly a pro-European who campaigned EU flag next to the French one on his platform. He really believes in the European Union – indeed, where Ms Le Pen is a French nationalist, Mr Macron is a Euro nationalist. He described Brexit as a “crime” and is not about to do Theresa May any favours. He regards the British Prime Minister, with her hostile rhetoric about Brussels, as a kind of Downton Abbey version of Ms Le Pen. The fact that our most prominent Brexiter, Ukip’s Nigel Farage campaigned for her didn’t help.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon wasted no time in celebrating Mr Macron’s victory. She is in the same broad tradition of pro-European internationalism, and will no doubt be beating a path to the Elysee Palace to revive the Auld Alliance. Mr Macron is big on her version of gender equality liberalism, and will no doubt give her a fair hearing – though no one should be under any illusion that France will negotiate directly with Scotland about remaining in the single market.
The further isolation of Brexit Britain is good news politically for the Scottish Government, even if the economic implications of Brexit are likely to be disastrous for Scotland. The Prime Minister’s latest pronouncements about cutting immigration to the tens of thousands in the UK is bad news for a country that needs 24,000 migrants a year to compensate for our ageing population. But stopping foreigners doesn’t win elections in France even though it has experienced greater mass immigration, and far greater terrorism in the past few years, than Britain or America. There have been more than 20 serious incidents since 2015, mostly involving Islamic State, including Charlie Hebdo and the Paris bombings which killed 137 people. There were two deadly Islamic State attacks in Paris during the presidential campaign itself.
Perhaps France, with its long history of political violence, is more phlegmatic about such incidents. But it surely a testament to the resilience of French democracy and liberal values that the National Front was unable to convert these atrocities into a tide of anti Muslim and anti-immigrant political reaction.
France isn’t immune to the anti-globalisation insurgency that has rocked Britain and America. There is discontent among the “left behinds” as they are called, the mainly white working classes who feel that globalisation has stolen their prosperity and security and who think that immigration needs to be halted to stop the evisceration of their culture. Many French people deeply resent the European Union, which they believe has allowed anonymous bankers in Frankfurt to dictate social and economic policies.
But the majority don’t want to leave the EU, and there’s a huge relief in Brussels at Mr Macron’s success – even though he has no party behind him and could find it difficult to govern. If the French Presidential election was a referendum on Europe and liberal values, the numbers speak for themselves.
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