If any surer sign was needed that Emmanuel Macron, the 39-year-old former minister of the economy, is the new front-runner in France’s presidential race, look no further than the concentrated volley of wild attacks against him. Even the Russians, via pro-Kremlin websites, are piling on.
France’s two major parties, on the right and the left, are in self-inflicted ruin, the first downed by the corruption scandal surrounding François Fillon, and the second by a utopian dreamer, Benoît Hamon. [...]
Yet Mr. Macron has never been elected to anything. He served two largely unsuccessful years directing France’s vast but sluggish economy, with scant accomplishment in his wake. He is not a member of either major party, or of any party, and is disliked by many of the Socialists in whose government he served. He claims to transcend the parties. [...]
He spoke of lowering taxes on companies, restraining capitalism, swiped at the “obscurantism” of Trump’s America and denounced the National Front for “betraying fraternity because it detests those faces that don’t resemble it.”
Mostly, it wasn’t concise or specific, but the crowd had not come for that.
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