
In the French election, a reprieve from rising nationalism
The French had plenty of reasons to vote for the anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-Islam National Front party leader Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s presidential election. The Bataclan nightclub slaughter, the Bastille Day massacre in Nice, and the Charlie Hebdo killings, to name but three. Instead, two-thirds voted for the centrist liberal status quo, in the person of Emmanuel Macron, the young new leader of a new party. So the populist-nationalist wave that swept the United States and Britain during the last year has stalled again in continental Europe. But that doesn’t mean we’ve seen the end of it. Jackson Doughart explains.