France wants a new saviour. Will it be Macron or Le Pen?

After having given themselves and the rest of us a fright, France’s voters have, by a worryingly small margin, stepped back from the brink. Some polls indicated a possible victory for the two extremists, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, either of whom would have meant disaster for France. Instead, the next President will almost certainly be the youthful centrist, Emmanuel Macron, the nearest to a viable establishment candidate. Though this is certainly a far lesser evil, it is evident that the political system of Europe’s oldest large democracy has gone spectacularly wrong. The minimum requirement of a functioning democracy is that a manageable range of sensible choices is put before the electorate, and that if not a consensus, at least a general acceptance of the result ensues. But the French have had to choose between four ‘major’ candidates (and seven others), all of them to some extent outsiders, none the first choice of even a quarter of the voters, and all proposing policies likely to provoke serious popular opposition.