Andrew Hussey at Literary Review:
A week or so before the election in May 2017 that brought Emmanuel Macron to power, I interviewed a senior academic at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, wishing to understand where Macron would be taking France if he won. The response from the professor was gloomy. This was, he said, first because people would be voting for Macron out of fear – at this stage the spectre of a victory for the Front National was still very much on the cards – and not any real belief in his policies. His would therefore be a government elected in bad faith.
Secondly, he went on, Macron severely underestimated how fiercely French people would resist his stated ambition to bring the French economy into a less regulated state and expose it to a globalised environment. For all of these reasons, Macron was bound to fail.
more here.