Victory sweeps Emmanuel Macron to heart of Europe’s revival

President Emmanuel Macron’s landslide victory on Sunday in the first round of his nation’s legislative elections is important for France but potentially even more important for the eurozone, the EU and Europe as a whole. After the second round next Sunday, Mr Macron will have an indisputable mandate to put into effect the programme of economic renewal and changes to the character of public life on which he was elected on May 7.

Sunday’s turnout, the lowest in a French parliamentary election for six decades, raises some concerns about the depth of public enthusiasm for Mr Macron’s policies. Nonetheless, his victory represents nothing less than a peaceful revolution in a country pivotal to Europe’s ability to play an influential role in world affairs.

As François Hollande’s presidency drew to its close, France was struggling with an array of challenges more formidable than at any time since the Fourth Republic tottered towards collapse in the late 1950s. Neither the Socialist Mr Hollande nor his centre-right predecessors, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, proved capable of tackling France’s economic problems, which range from high unemployment and endless budget deficits to a widening performance gap between the French and German economies.

No less serious was the public’s declining faith in France’s traditional political parties and the presidency’s fading aura since the days of Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand. To cap it all, France’s secular way of life was under strain from racial and religious tensions, and a series of terror attacks from November 2015 prompted the authorities to impose a state of emergency that is still in place today.

The victory of Mr Macron’s La République en Marche (REM) party suggests that the French electorate wants the young president to restore a sense of purpose and confidence to a country trapped for two decades in a suffocating malaise. To the extent that he succeeds, this will open up opportunities for France to join Germany, where Angela Merkel is well-placed to win re-election as chancellor in September, in making the eurozone a more complete economic union and the EU a more efficient bloc in policy areas such as economic innovation, migration and defence.

The test will be Mr Macron’s proposed labour market reforms. He wants to encourage flexible, company-based agreements between management and employees instead of deals negotiated within industrial sectors that are tied up in the rigidities of France’s 3,000-page labour code.

To achieve his ends quickly, Mr Macron is prepared to push through these changes without lengthy parliamentary scrutiny. This raises the issue of whether France’s trade unions, and disgruntled sections of the broader public, will put up resistance, as they have done repeatedly since the mid-1990s.

Here it should be recalled that, in the first round of the presidential election on April 23, more than 40 per cent of the electorate voted for the far-right Marine Le Pen and the radical leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, candidates who fiercely opposed the kind of liberal economic reforms central to Mr Macron’s vision of change.

Yet the unions will face a government that is much more convinced than its predecessors of the urgency with which France must be reformed. Moreover, it will have a powerful political mandate to take action on account of Mr Macron’s presidential and legislative election triumphs.

If Mr Macron makes good progress, the next crucial question will be Germany’s response. Advocates of deeper eurozone and EU integration yearn for France and Germany to march more closely in step. With the UK leaving the EU, Turkey drifting from its European orientation, Russia truculent and the Balkans unstable, the burden of leadership is likely to rest ever more heavily on Mr Macron and Ms Merkel.