Macron Faces Challenges After Winning the French Election

The most unpredictable presidential election campaign in the history of the Fifth Republic ended with a suitably surprising outcome: For once, the pollsters and the commentators were right. After the confounding of the experts in last June's Brexit referendum and last November's U.S. presidential election, the pollsters redeemed their profession by predicting correctly that Emmanuel Macron would defeat Marine Le Pen in Sunday's second round of voting for the French presidency.

Then again, as psephological challenges go, this result was not hard to predict. The French system is designed to prevent candidates like Le Pen from winning. The first round reduces a wide field to a knockout. In the second round, le front republicain, the "republican front" against electing an extremist, gave Macron the presidency. The polls consistently predicted that strategic voting would give Macron a victory of 60 percent to 40 precent or more. By late Sunday afternoon, an exit poll gave Macron 65.1 percent to Le Pen's 35.9 percent.

Yet Macron's win is more clear than comprehensive. He is a politician with a party that exists in his name only. En Marche!, or "On the March" shares his initials, and its positions are nothing more than his electoral slogans. He has five weeks, until the French legislative elections, in which to assemble a list of candidates and create a parliamentary presence.

It is highly likely that the legislative elections will lead to a cohabitation government, in which a president tries to advance policies while handicapped by his party being a weak member of a coalition. This will oblige Macron to rely upon the support of the Socialists—the party that he repudiated when he launched En Marche!, the party that he ostensibly campaigned against in the presidential election.

Nor should the scale of opposition to Macron be underestimated. The first round showed that Macron was the first choice of only a quarter of French voters—about the same number as Le Pen. Until François Fillon self-destructed in February amid accusations that he improperly employed his family members as assistants, Macron was stuck in third place and looked set to be eliminated. In the second round, more than a third of voters stuck with Le Pen even when it was clear that she was going to lose. They wanted to register a protest—not just against the failed Socialist government of François Hollande, but also against the drift of French society and politics in recent decade.