Who is popular today?

By any measure, President Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the second round of voting in the French presidential election was a resounding one. In securing 58 per cent of the vote, he became the first president in two decades to be reelected. Yet many will inevitably turn to the 42 per cent won by the far-Right candidate, Marine Le Pen. She may have softened her language and benefited from France’s own rising cost of living, but she remains a figure of the hard-Right, who maintained close ties with Vladimir Putin for years.