AFTERWORD / Macron, the Nouveau Monde, and the Crowning of the Public-Private Elite

France is blocked by the self-serving tendencies of its elite. And I’ll tell you a little secret: I know it, I was part of it. Emmanuel Macron, Rally in Pau, April 2017 As the French edition of this book was barely making its way into bookshops and libraries, a major political breakdown suddenly hit France. Thirty-nine-year-old Emmanuel Macron, who was virtually unknown to the general public up to three years earlier, and had never before run a single campaign large or small nor been democratically elected to any political position, unexpectedly won the presidential election on his first try. As a victor over France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen, he immediately became the object of liberal admiration throughout a world that saw Macron’s France as an island of resistance in a global context of the rise of populisms. As he claimed to govern France “neither at the left, neither at the right,” Macron’s political positioning that combined promarket, socially liberal, and pro-European ideas profoundly broke away from France’s past political coordinates. Within only a few months, his political movement ...