After belatedly realising rationality wasn’t enough to win, the president needs to heal a ‘fractured’ society’s sense of injustice
crisis and people’s very real fears of making ends meet would play a greater role than he had anticipated in the campaign. His economic statistics on paper did not match everyone’s felt experience on the ground. Six months earlier, the far right’s Marine Le Pen had foreseen that workers on low and middle incomes felt they weren’t being heard or understood. She styled herself as “the candidate of a France that is suffering” and went under the radar across the countryside to listen to them.
During the campaign, Macron conceded that if the French far right had risen to its highest ever levels in the presidential first round – with Le Pen and the newcomer TV pundit Éric Zemmour taking more than 30% – it was because he himself “had not managed to calm a certain anger”.gilets jaunes Some in Macron’s government had initially felt this year’s election would play out along the lines of moderation,But it became clear in the final weeks of the presidential campaign that “rationality” was not enough: there needed to be an emotional connection to people’s everyday lives. Le Pen attacked Macron as “power without empathy”. His brilliance at number-crunching and his professorial explanations of the efficiency of his policies were seen by some as technocratic abstraction.
Against this backdrop of doubt towards the political class, Macron accepted that the country was fractured and divided. The immediate challenge is how a sense of unity can begin to be knitted back together and what form the parliament will take in June.
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