France is in a flap and Emmanuel Macron is to blame. On Sunday evening the En Marche! leader looked for all the world like a man who believed he’d already been crowned king. Bounding onto stage with a wink, a wave and a smile to his adoring supporters, after his first round victory, he then partied the night away at a Parisian bistro surrounded by the great and the good of France’s liberal elite. Marine Le Pen, meanwhile, after a brief speech to her supporters in the northern town of Henin-Beaumont, left to start plotting her second round campaign.
On Monday evening she appeared on the main news programme to announce she was stepping down as National Front leader; on Tuesday she was back on primetime TV, subjecting herself to a two-hour interview on TF1, and on Wednesday she turned up unannounced in Amiens, Macron’s home town, to address the workers of Whirlpool, an appliances plant threatened with closure with its business being outsourced to Poland.
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