Ever since Donald Trump proved last November that anything is possible in the new world of Western politics, May 7 has been circled on European calendars with a mix of giddy anticipation and existential dread.
To right-wing populists, the presidential election in France – a country scarred by unemployment and terrorism – seemed to offer the next big opportunity to remake the postwar global order in their own nationalist, nativist and protectionist image.
To the mainstream, it looked like a possible third strike after Trump and Brexit – one with the potential to doom the European Union, NATO and other pillars of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
In final pre-election polling, independent centrist Emmanuel Macron held an overwhelming advantage of around 25 points over far-right challenger Marine Le Pen – up from 20 points days earlier.
The choice voters face on Sunday illustrates the profound new chasm in the West: between those who favor open, globalized societies and others who prefer closed, nationalized ones.
“The world is focused on France because France has managed to encapsulate – almost to the point of caricature – the debate underway across the world,” Paris Sciences Po politics professor Madani Cheurfa said.
Macron, a 39-year-old former banker and economy minister, celebrates immigration as a force for good. Flags with the E.U.’s blue field and gold stars are a common sight at his rallies, and he endorses the bloc as the continent’s best guarantor of peace. His supporters tend to be educated, urban and optimistic.
Le Pen, the 48-year-old leader of a far-right party that her father founded in the 1970s, rails against the evils of mass immigration and warns that France is losing its identity amid a tide of mostly Muslim newcomers. She has called for the dismantling of the E.U., threatened to take France out of NATO and heaped praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her backers tend to be rural, white, less educated and, without a radical shift in direction, gloomy about France’s future.
If Macron claims the presidency on Sunday, his supporters say they will be more relieved than exultant.
“If we win, we have five years to do something with it,” former elementary school teacher Aurélie Quartier said.
Quartier, 38, said she had never been involved in politics until this year, when she realized that Le Pen’s National Front could actually take hold of the Élysee Palace. So she’s been out on the streets every day for the past month, talking to her neighbors and trying to convince them that regardless of how they feel about Macron, they need to vote for him to block Le Pen.
To Quartier, Le Pen and her movement represent an affront to the multicultural way of life that Quartier has come to know in a neighborhood where the smell of Turkish spices wafts from the weekly market, and the corner grocery store is run by an Arab owner who specializes in Serbian fare.
For Le Pen supporter Eve Froger, a 20-year-old law student, Sunday presents France with an equally dramatic decision. “I’m worried about unemployment and housing and security and the defense of French identity,” she said.
She decided at the age of 18 that the only party that spoke to her concerns was the National Front. Froger has been campaigning for the party ever since.
Raised by a single mother in a hardscrabble Paris suburb, Froger said affluent and cosmopolitan city-dwellers have little idea of the problems facing ordinary French citizens. She was pleased when Macron won a place in the second round against Le Pen because Froger sees him as the sharpest contrast to her champion, the ultimate symbol of an out-of-touch, globalized elite.
“He’s a man of the financial system with no compassion for the people of France,” Froger said. “He only cares about himself and the E.U. What defines this election is on one side the defense of the EU’s interests and on the other side the defense of France’s interests.”