A hard centre

In the end, France opted for laissez-faire over the radical unknown of the far right. In his second term as president, can Emmanuel Macron find a way to connect with an angry and fractured nation?

- Angelique Chrisafis

On the campaign trail in Denain, one of the poorest towns in France, Emmanuel Macron walked into a crowd of voters to “take the pulse of the nation” and a woman pushed forward to sum up the mood. “We're living in misery,” she said. Others shouted: “This country doesn't work” and “We've had enough”. When one father described not managing to make ends meet, Macron said: “That's what I'm fighting for.” The man shot back: "That's not the impression I have."

Macron, a former banker, who had loosened labour laws and promised the biggest overhaul of the French welfare state since the war, was lauded internationally for making France a "star economic performer" of the pandemic era-growth had bounced back faster than expected from the Covid crisis, unemployment was at its lowest level for more than a decade, and government caps on gas and electricity prices kept French prices from rising as fast as those in European neighbours.

But, when Macron got up close to voters in town squares across France - keen to compensate for a persistent image as haughty and cut off from everyday concerns - he realised that the cost of living crisis and people's real fears of making ends meet would play a greater role than he had anticipated in the campaign.

His economic statistics on paper did not match everyone's felt experience on the ground. Six months earlier, the far right's Marine Le Pen had foreseen that workers on low and middle incomes felt they weren't being heard or understood. She styled herself as "the candidate of a France that is suffering” and went to listen to them.