Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France on Sunday in a victory for a political newcomer who campaigned on promises to revamp France’s heavily regulated economy and fight a tide of nationalism sweeping the European Union. The 39-year-old former investment banker has vowed to undertake contentious changes to labor markets in France as part of a push for greater economic convergence among the EU’s fractious member states. At the core of his program are overhauls of France’s sluggish economy and the eurozone, with all its shortcomings. To get what he wants, he will first have to convince a skeptical Germany. Mr. Macron won 66.1% of the vote, surpassing pollsters’ predictions that he would win about 60%. Marine Le Pen, who ran on a plan to pull the country out of the euro and close its borders to migrants, took 33.9%. The euro briefly touched a seven-month high against the dollar after the results.
The European Crisis
In Europe as in the United States, recent trends in culture and economics have elevated an educated upper class while separating it, geographically and ideologically and in every other way, from a declining and fragmenting working class.
In Europe as in the United States, a growing immigrant population serves this upper class while seeming to compete with downscale natives for jobs, housing and social benefits. In Europe as in the United States, the center-left coalition has become a kind of patronage arrangement between the multicultural meritocracy and minority groups both new and old, while the white working class drifts rightward and votes for Brexit, Trump and now Le Pen.
.. these problems are worse in Europe, part of a systemic crisis that’s more serious than our own.
They’re worse because Europe is stuck with a horribly flawed experiment in political economy, a common currency without a common fiscal policy or a central political authority capable of claiming real legitimacy.
.. They’re worse because Europe has had sub-replacement fertility for much longer than the United States
.. mass immigration seem more culturally threatening to natives even as it seems more desirable to technocrats.
.. They’re worse because Europe is a continent of ethno-states without a strong assimilative tradition
.. Finally, they’re worse because European governance has a greater democracy deficit than the United States, and because the European ruling class already relies more than its American counterpart on illiberal methods — restrictions on speech that would be the envy of our campus commisars, counterterrorism methods that would make Jeff Sessions blush, even the spread of “voluntary” euthanasia as a solution to age and illness and unhappiness — to maintain the continental peace.
.. This is a tangle of problems that no single statesman or party, however brilliant, is likely to cut through; they can be only managed, not resolved.
But much of elite European politics seems to be organized around the premise that they are really problems only because they might lead to an extremist party taking power. So the important thing is to concentrate every effort on delegitimizing and defeating and excluding critics (be they right wing or, as in many Mediterranean countries, far left) rather than solving the problems that the outsiders often quite accurately identify.
.. the policy alternative that the right-wing populists often offer —
- hard limits on immigration, new financial support for families,
- a re-emphasis on national sovereignty,
- the unwinding of the euro
— is in some ways less extreme than the open-borders and onward-to-federalism fantasies still nursed by the elite
.. in which secularism gives ground to religious pluralism even as it firmly demands certain forms of assimilation.
No, Erdogan was not an authoritarian all along
The idea that Erdogan is nothing more than a power-seeking megalomaniac is hard to reconcile with his first term as prime minister. After he assumed that office in March 2003, he oversaw three rounds of political reforms, including diminishing the role of the military in politics, strengthening the freedom of the press, doing away with state security courts and changing the penal code.
.. Erdogan is an extraordinarily shrewd and paranoid politician, character traits that feed off of, and complement, each other. His fears are compounded by the fact that the military high command and the Constitutional Court shuttered four of the AKP’s predecessor parties between 1971 and 2001 for anti-secular activities.
.. And in 2007, the Turkish General Staff attempted to prevent Gul from becoming president because his wife wears a hijab, an indicator of reactionary values for Turkey’s ideologically committed secularists.
.. in 2008, prosecutors brought a case against the AKP in Turkey’s Constitutional Court, charging the party with being a “center for anti-secular activities” and seeking its closure. The party narrowly escaped that fate and was forced to pay a $20 million fine instead.
.. Taken together, these episodes amounted to victories for Erdogan, but they convinced him that Turkey’s elites would never rest until the AKP was brought low.
.. Europe’s ambivalence after negotiations began undermined them. This wavering was a result of collective disbelief that the Turks had undertaken enough reforms to start negotiations and, even more central, uncertainty among Europeans about the nature of their union. Was it a club of democracies that were coterminous with predominantly Christian countries, or was it based on shared values, ideals and norms?
.. French and Austrian governments declared that they would hold referenda on Turkey’s membership even after the successful completion of negotiations — a measure these governments never contemplated for other E.U. candidates.
.. With Europe making it clear that a large, overwhelmingly Muslim nation was not welcome, public support in Turkey for the E.U. project, which was as high as 73 percent in 2004, registered as low as 40 percent in 2007, leaving the country with no external anchor for reform.
.. Because Turkey is regarded as an ally in so many areas of importance to the United States — including the Middle East, Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, the Caucuses and Central Asia — successive U.S. administrations have been loath to publicly criticize Erdogan and the AKP for their domestic excesses. Regardless of what might have been said in private, Turkey’s ruling party used American reluctance to call it out, especially during the Obama years, as license to continue to repress and intimidate its opponents.
.. And yes, publicly chastising Erdogan may not have changed his behavior. But it would have signaled American support for principles the United States holds dear — and that at least some of the Turkish leader’s opponents share.
.. it is important to understand that the circumstances in which Turks now find themselves are a product of their country’s contested political environment, which is often defined in existential terms; European cynicism; and American indifference to anything other than security. The unfortunate result is a country that is both authoritarian and unstable.
What Would a Le Pen Victory in France Mean for Markets?
‘It would be seismic, bigger than Trump or Brexit for markets, if Le Pen got into office and called into question the euro itself’
“It would be seismic, bigger than Trump or Brexit for markets, if Le Pen got into office and called into question the euro itself,”