Young populists

The first round of France's presidential election brought a major test of the appeal of a populist message. And in just a few weeks, French voters will choose between Emmanuel Macron, a young outsider with more global and market-oriented leanings, and a candidate who is the avatar of nationalist populism, Marine Le Pen.

The French election results, combined with fresh polling from Harvard's Institute of Politics, suggest that elements of the populist message may well be appealing to a younger generation that has grown distrustful of the establishment and other political and economic systems that have governed the world in which they have grown up.

On paper, Emmanuel Macron should be a candidate tailor-made for young voters. He himself is young. He pushes for more entrepreneurship, modernization, and a loosening of regulations that prevent young workers from working as they please when they please.

And yet, the data tell a different story. Exit polls in France show voters aged 18-24 were Macron's weakest age group, where the top-performing candidate was far-left populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, garnering 30 percent of the youth vote. (Those uninitiated in the world of French politics can think of Mélenchon as France's extreme version of Bernie Sanders.)

Maybe that's not surprising. But behind Mélenchon comes none other than…Marine Le Pen, the other populist in the race. Le Pen is often described as "far-right" but certainly embraces nothing like right-of-center economic policy as we know it in the United States. Combined, the two establishment parties in France – the incumbent president's Socialist Party as well as the center-right Republican Party – earned only 19 percent of the vote.