Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
KUALA LUMPUR: The French voters just gave Emmanuel Macron another five-year mandate as president, after he defeated Marine Le Pen in the second round of presidential elections, a repeat of the run-off five years ago. It would appear that the so-called yellow-jacket protests that swept across France a few years ago protesting socioeconomic malaise have largely dissipated despite the hardships engendered by the coronavirus pandemic which the French people, together with people from around the world, must have acutely suffered.
A somewhat centrist appeal, beholden to neither the left nor the right of the political spectrum, seemed to have taken hold in France. Macron gave in to some loud social-welfare appeals of the yellow jacketeers. But he also pressed on with some of France's much-needed structural market reforms, freeing up entrepreneurship and in general making France a much more business-friendly jurisdiction. Le Pen's calls for France's exit from both the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did have some electoral echoes, but in the end these were not enough to bring her over the top to clinch the French presidency. Riding on popular socioeconomic dissatisfaction and proposing radical or even outlandish, but sometimes irrelevant, solutions are trademarks of populism, and at least for the moment, the French electorate rejected their fatal attraction.
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