RUTHFULLY YOURS

French voters chose a centrist reformer over the nationalist right on Sunday by electing Emmanuel Macron as their next President. The question now is whether Mr. Macron can deliver on his promise to reform France’s sclerotic economy and diminish the Islamist terror threat.

Mr. Macron’s decisive victory is as much a rejection of the far-right National Front as an endorsement of his platform. Despite Marine Le Pen’s yearslong effort to whitewash her party’s reputation for anti-Semitism and Vichy nostalgia, the keys to the Élysée Palace proved as elusive to her as they did to her father, Jean-Marie, in 2002’s presidential runoff against Jacques Chirac.

Mr. Macron deserves credit for his initiative. The 39-year-old former investment banker quit the incumbent Socialists to launch his independent centrist movement, En Marche! His outsider status and optimistic vision proved attractive to voters fed up with traditional political parties. He offered a clear if modest reform alternative, with proposals to shrink the bureaucracy, cut corporate taxes and modify the job-killing 35-hour workweek.
He was also lucky. The center-right Republican nominee François Fillon, a self-proclaimed Thatcherite, was felled by allegations of nepotism. Independent, hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon divided the socialist vote. In the runoff Mr. Macron was the default choice of voters who wanted to block the National Front.

This means President Macron will have a fragile mandate and a narrow window to press his agenda. France needs radical reform of a government that in 2015 took 57% of national GDP and an economy with a jobless rate that is 10% eight years after the financial crisis.

Yet political failure is the recent French norm. Successive Presidents have failed to undo the 1999 35-hour-workweek law amid militant union protests. Mr. Mélenchon and his “Unbowed France” movement are promising chaos if Mr. Macron dares to advance what the socialist calls “neoliberalism.” Mr. Macron’s best bet is to go big and abolish the 35-hour workweek as Mr. Fillon promised, rather than seek marginal fixes and pay the political price anyway. The same goes for cutting the corporate tax rate to 25% from 33.3%, especially as the U.S. heads toward a 20% rate.

Macron 65.5%

Le Pen 34.5%

2:30 PM: in less than six hours the name of the next French president will be announced. I don’t need to go far out on a limb to predict it will be Emmanuel Macron. Though Marine Le Pen briefly enjoyed an outside chance to overcome the odds and squeak into victory, she destroyed it on the night of the debate. By the way, the official audience figure is 16.5 million, well under the predicted 20 to 22 million that I cited in Part 6. Why do I argue that she has no one to blame but herself for her display of incompetence, confusion, bad faith and bad taste? Because she herself proudly boasted that she had deliberately chosen a totally appropriate and, what’s more, a winning strategy. Her running mate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan publicly and proudly agreed, and many of her supporting commentators concurred. She was expressing the anger of the people. Some are even suggesting at this late hour that her audacious performance will prove to be stronger than all the forces allied against her. They are confident that she will win on an upset!

I can’t understand this uncritical support for someone that has never displayed the qualities of a viable leader of the résistance against jihad. Is vociferous denunciation of Islamization all it takes to fit the bill? If that were so, there would be no difference between writing a blog and leading a nation or even leading the opposition to a jihad-friendly government. In a democracy, you have to convince a majority of voters, you have to get elected. And then you need all the qualities of a brilliant, exceptional, strong, upstanding, competent political leader capable of prevailing over tremendous domestic and international odds.

This explains my dismay at the constant flow of messages from friends and allies in the United States telling me that Marine Le Pen will win, should win, or would be the best choice. The odds when the official campaign ended at midnight Friday were 62% to 38%. Where in the world have we ever seen an upset of that dimension? I will not repeat here all the verified evidence I have reported over the past five years to show the ambiguity of Marine Le Pen’s position on Islam. Can you set aside the coziness with Assad and Hezbollah, the antizionism of her pre-chosen prime minister, her tactical pressure on French Jews to accept sacrifices so the limits she will impose on Muslims won’t seem discriminatory? Do you understand what it means to dual French-Israeli citizens to be told they will have to choose one or the other? Is Frexit the French version of Brexit? Aside from the fact that Marine has surreptitiously dropped it from her platform, there is no comparison. Great Britain was never in the Eurozone, has a vibrant economy and, by its historical and geographical separation from the Continent and Churchillian tradition, has the guts to negotiate a tough divorce from a stubborn EU.

Seen from the USA, the free enterprise capital of the world, Marine Le Pen’s economic platform that fits hand in glove with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Bolivarian dreams-anticapitalist, antiglobalist, anti-American, and naïvely protectionist-might seem too vague to matter. Here on the ground, it would be disastrous. And the double-decker monetary system? The way she described it during the debate, multinationals would use the euro for their unspeakable foreign intercourse and the good French salt of the earth folks will have their francs as delicious as the baguettes they’ll purchase with them. A candidate that can float such preposterous notions is trustworthy on all things Islamic? It’s not logical.

Besides, she’s going to lose. And we’ll be stuck with Emmanuel Macron. In a democracy, you have to win elections if you want to implement your policies. However brilliant, if you can’t convince voters, you’re back in the shadows with the unsung poets.

The Dump

May surprise, Wikileaks ex machina, the eleventh hour dump, the world-shaking upset. Gigantic hack of Emmanuel Macron’s computers. And wild hopes are blooming. Of course no one’s interested in messages about the candidate’s appointment with his barber, who’s going to pick up his suit at the cleaner’s, how many wreaths to order for the memorial ops. All eyes are focused on the explosive offshore account documents. Macron stashed the millions he made as investment banker chez Rothschild (the name that always gets a wink) in a phony offshore company on one of those islands. Wikileaks leaked the supposedly Russian-hacked documents. French media will be released from the election weekend gag order at 8 o’clock tonight. Instead of popping champagne corks with Emmanuel and Brigitte, they’ll be picking through the dump looking for gold. Or maybe the miracle is already happening and thanks to Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange, Marine will be présidente!

Thursday’s local elections in Britain look somewhat less dramatic than people were expecting in the light of national opinion polls showing Theresa May’s Tories literally twice as popular as the Labour Opposition. The BBC summary was : Tories gain eleven councils and 563 seats; Labour lose seven councils and 382 seats; and UKIP retains just one seat nationally.

That looks pretty good for the Tories, very bad for Labour; disappointing for the Liberal Democrats; and terminally bad for UKIP.

For various reasons, however — mainly low turnout — this overall picture is misleading. Though chickens shouldn’t be counted before being hatched, the Tory prospects for June’s general election are even better than they look terrific, which is terrific; Labour’s, very bad but short of terminal; the Lib-Dems’, purgatorial; and UKIP’s, terminal but with an escape clause. Unless all the pundits are wildly wrong — not an impossibility, as we know, but not likely either — the Tories will win a landslide with a three-figure parliamentary majority over all opposition parties. They are on course to be the natural governing party of Britain for the next three elections and two decades.

That’s a massive turnaround from the results of the 2010 election, when the Tories fell short of a majority, and the 2015 election, when they had a small and vulnerable majority. What happened in the meanwhile?

The answer, of course, is Brexit.

According to all the wise men (and wise women too, of course), what Brexit was supposed to do was to divide the Tory party at all levels and render it incapable of government. What Brexit actually did was to repair a deep and bitter gulf on “Europe” that had divided the Tories at all levels since the Macmillan and Heath governments committed their party to Europeanism. And within a few months of the June referendum, the Tories had both reunited with surprising ease around a clear Brexit agenda and leapt from levels of support in the high 30s to stable figures of 44 to 48 per cent in polls. Large seismic shifts in the UK’s traditional voting blocs are therefore following.

To grasp why and how that’s happening, we should first consider the nature of the Tory party.

Toryism has three overlapping identities. It is the party of economic freedom and enterprise — Mrs. Thatcher is the purest symbol of that identity. It is the party of British nationalism — Churchill and Disraeli are the greatest figures in that tradition. Its third strand, however, is a more complicated one: It’s the party that always seeks to interpret, defend, and advance the interests of the British state in a skeptical and non-partisan way — Lord Salisbury and Sir Robert Peel are the most distinguished exemplars of that view.