The New Yorker:

By Lauren Collins

Five years ago, when I interviewed the French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace, his party had just lost the European elections, finishing second to Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National by less than one percentage point. The defeat was actually a sort of victory. “In the dicey, regressing world order of 2019, maintenance qualifies as progress,” I wrote. After a turbulent period of street protests by members of the ad-hoc gilets jaunes (or Yellow Vests) movement, Macron’s base—somewhere in the bombed-out middle of the traditional left-vs.-right system—had held strong. “A lot of politicians thought that 2017 was an exception, or something like an aberration,” he told me, referring to his election, two years earlier. “This is no longer the case.”

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