Michael Meadowcroft, Anne Luke and Nick Moss on the re-elected French president’s next five years in power
Your leading article (25 April) is right to point to Emmanuel Macron’s urgent task: to tackle the reasons that led more than 40% of French electors to support a candidate with diametrically opposite views to his own. However, the huge underlying problem that will constrain that task is the lack of values-based political parties across the whole spectrum to the left of Marine Le Pen’s far-right movement.
In 2017, Macron entered the political world without any party affiliation and was elected as president as a consequence of a series of accidents that neither he nor the French parties could have foreseen. Both the major parties of right and left imploded as a consequence of their own internal problems and Macron’s En Marche leapt into the vacuum.
