The electorate in France can be fickle.
In the US, we’re still on our first repubilc, but for the French, they’re in their fifth, thanks to Charles De Gaulle (1890-1970), a tall, austere military man who, from London, inspired the French resistance to Hitler. He also managed to have a major international airport named after him.
In today’s presidential run-off election, the choice was between Emmanuel Macron, the founder of a coalition party called En Marche! (roughly translated as the Let’s Move Forward Party) and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Macron is viewed as arrogant and he is unpopullar, but had Le Pen (who lost to Macron in 2017) won, she would have turned the economy of the EU on a tailspin. She is notoriously anti-immigrant, and she would have absolutely no idea how to approach Russia’s bloodthirsty war in Ukraine, while Macron seeks to play a mediating role (https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/24/europe/french-election-results-macron-le-pen-intl/index.html). In short, Secretary of State Antony Blinken breathed a welcome sigh of relief as he awaits his critical meeting today in Kyiv with President Zelenskyy.
Blessed (we think) with a parliamentary system (had these here United States had one of them there political systems during LBJ’s Vietnam War, we could stopped that gruesome war a whole lot quicker — anyway, the Fifth French Republic, well, it is what it is, according to longtime Parisian political observer and newly minted associate solitary reporter Charlene Mysterieuse, a friend of your solitary reporter since they met on a boat from Brindisi to Corfu in 1962. She married Bruno a few years later, and her exquisite Par Monts et par coeur, a series of sketches of life in France, has sold close to ten million copies globally.
Another fact in France’s favor is that they vote on Sundays, something we here in the United States have yet to do.