France has elected a new President: What comes next?

France has a new President, a brilliant young man whose audacity, political flair and singlemindedness carried a political neophyte from nowhere to victory in a single year. True, the existing order was already faltering and the primaries produced unelectable mainstream candidates both left and right that opened new space in the political centre. Marine Le Pen, who had worked for a decade to become respectable, blew it all with a disastrous debate performance that showed her unpleasant, divisive and empty. By contrast, Emmanuel Macron delivered a message of sincerity, hope and national reconciliation.

The road ahead won’t be easy and some are already demonstrating in the streets. The President needs a parliamentary majority, preferably without alliances, so his “movement” will contest all 577 seats in the national assembly. He starts, of course, from zero with no established local presence. His critics say he is just another product of the “elitist system”, a Francois Hollande reincarnated or the incarnation of detested finance and global capitalism. But he has consistently confounded his critics and he will benefit from a widespread desire for political renewal. While he occupies centre stage, his adversaries are caught in the backwash of electoral failure: divisive internal arguments about polices and people, complicated by Macron’s magnetic attraction.

And then there is the President himself. Still not well known and clearly underestimated, his spectacular ascension needs a better explanation than plain good luck. He had no programme, they said, but he clearly has a vision for the future. A strong rejuvenated French state built on individual entrepreneurship and reconciled with the world as it is, unafraid of globalisation demons. A France of self-confidence and conquest, reclaiming its rightful place beside Germany in a Europe that protects better than any nation can alone.

Biographers describe a supremely self-confident young man with a sense of personal destiny. Steely determination behind the ready smile. A rare capacity to listen, negotiate and persuade. Intellectual agility and the ability to adapt. Pragmatism not ideology. No rash promises, but a commitment to reform. A man who met his future wife, 24 years his senior, in drama class: wooed her away from her husband and charmed her three children. After returning from the private sector to government – reversing the modern trend -- he resigned to make his own political career. Emmanuel Macron has now made two generations of seasoned politicians look suddenly old, brushing aside in the process two former presidents and three prime ministers.