Emmanuel Macron is now Europe’s standard-bearer

IN POLITICS, AS on the catwalk, fashions come and go. In Europe in the 1980s it was Britain that dazzled with its daring ideas, as Margaret Thatcher’s state-shrinking, red-tape-slashing policies inspired numerous imitators and even more furious protest songs. In the noughties came Germany’s turn. Sensible economic reforms helped firms there seize the new opportunities of globalisation, the better to sell unstructured Hugo Boss suits to upwardly mobile Russians and Chinese. Ideologically the 2020s belong to France. Its big idées—a scepticism of free markets, an acceptance of the state’s role in shaping everything from farming to culture, haughty declarations of independence from America—are vintage stuff. But like a Louis Vuitton clutch re-released to adoring fashionistas, this line of thinking is once again back in vogue.