Like him or loathe him, Macron is Europe’s driving force

If you want to know why Marine Le Pen almost certainly won’t win the French presidency on 24 April, listen to the speech of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the man who came third in today’s first round of the presidential election. ‘We know who we will never vote for!’ said Mélenchon, the far-left autodidact who somehow outdid his strong 2017 performance and won more than 20 per cent of the vote tonight. ‘We’ll never give up our confidence in democracy.’

He then repeated, four times or more, as the crowd cheered louder and louder: ‘We mustn’t give a single vote to Marine Le Pen.’ The worry for the French establishment is that a large number of Melenchon’s voters – furious as they are after five years of Macron’s leadership – will not listen to his counsel and will plump for Le Pen, whose ‘anti-globaliste’ economic programme speaks to them more than anything Macron proposes.