The establishment got another burning in the French elections on Sunday, revealing again that there is no level of voter disgust that will not find some voice in the current range of elections. The terror for pollsters and the establishment now is whether Marine Le Pen will realise her anti-Euro project and drag the French nation kicking and moaning into a new, even more fractious order. In her way will be the pro-European Union figure of Emmanuel Macron.
The French example is similar to others of recent times: parties with presumed tenure were confined to a punitive dustbin, rubbished for stale, estranged obsolescence. The Gaullists got what was a fair drubbing – 19.9 percent for François Fillon of the Republicans, a figure crusted and potted with corruption.
It did not, however, mean that both candidates in the first and second positions were political virgins. In that sense, the US election remains an exemplar, a true shock. France retains a traditional appearance to it, albeit a violently ruffled one.
Macron, with his 23.9 percent, supposedly deemed outside the establishment, still held office as minister for economy, finance and industry but flew the Socialist coop in opportunistic fancy. Blooded in traditional harness, he has managed to give the impression that he has shed enough of the old for the new, notably with his movement En Marche. He is blowing hard from what commentators have termed a “centrist” position. (To be at the centre…