Briefing | Beating the hard right

France looks likely to re-elect Emmanuel Macron

But his race against Marine Le Pen is a lot closer than it was last time

|AMIENS AND PARIS

ON APRIL 6TH 2016 a 38-year-old former investment banker who, two years before, had been appointed as a minister in France’s Socialist government announced that he wanted to change French politics. Standing in front of an audience in his home town of Amiens he declared that the old divisions between left and right were not relevant to 21st-century challenges. Matters such as climate change, or Europe, split the established mainstream parties as much as they held them together. It was time for a “political movement” that would be “neither on the left nor the right”.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Standing out from the crowd”

Why Macron’s fate matters beyond France

From the April 9th 2022 edition

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