Good news, I think: French people weren’t put off at all by Emmanuel Macron’s creepy-as-hell love story, nor were they disturbed by the idea of Brigitte “Arguably A Sexual Predator” Macron as First Lady as France. Well, maybe the French people did care, but they were totally willing to overlook it if it meant NOT voting for a Holocaust-denying fascist, Marine le Pen. Macron entered the home stretch of the French presidential runoff with what was considered a healthy-but-slim lead in all of the polls. Well, the polls were wrong, but unlike the American election, the wrongness of the polls didn’t make me want to throw up. As it turns out, Macron didn’t just beat le Pen by a slim margin. He had a landslide victory. He demolished her.

France on Sunday shrugged off the siren call of right-wing populism that enchanted voters in the United States and United Kingdom, rejecting anti-E.U. firebrand Marine Le Pen and choosing as its next president Emmanuel Macron, a centrist political neophyte who has pledged to revive both his struggling country and the flailing continent.

The result brought to a close a tumultuous and polarized campaign that defied prediction at nearly every turn, though not at the end. Pre-election polls had forecast a sizable Macron victory, and he appeared to have delivered, with projections issued after polls closed showing him with around 65 percent of the vote.

A downcast Le Pen conceded defeat, telling her demoralized supporters in Paris that the country had “chosen continuty.” Meanwhile, a raucous celebration of Macron backers was getting underway outside Paris’s Louvre Museum.

The outcome will come as a major relief to Europe’s political establishment, which had feared a Le Pen victory would throw in reverse decades of efforts to forge continental integration.

But it instantly puts pressure on Macron to deliver on promises made to an unhappy French electorate, including reform of two institutions notoriously resistant to change: the European Union and the French bureaucracy.

At 39, the trim, blue-eyed and square-jawed Macron will become France’s youngest leader since Napoleon when he is inaugurated this weekend, and his election caps an astonishing rise.

With a background in investment banking and a turn as economy minister under a historically unpopular president, he may have seemed an ill fit for the anti-establishment anger coursing through Western politics.

But by bucking France’s traditional parties and launching his own movement – En Marche, or Onward — Macron managed to cast himself as the outsider the country needs. And by unapologetically embracing the European Union, immigration and the multicultural tableau of modern France, he positioned himself as the optimistic and progressive antidote to the dark and reactionary vision of Le Pen’s National Front.

[From Washington Post]

There are lots of elements which are similar and yet dissimilar in comparing the French and American elections. In both elections, the female candidate faced a barrage of criticism unique to her womanity, and I tend to believe misogyny and sexism played roles in both elections. That being said, Americans voted for a fascist and the French people did not, so well done, French people. I do wonder: if Marine le Pen had been a paternalistic white dude spouting the exact same views, would the election have been more of a dogfight? Who even knows? As for Macron… or, President Macron, I wish him well. People keep saying he has the potential to be France’s JFK or Barack Obama. We’ll see. And we’ll definitely see what kind of role First Lady Brigitte Macron plays in all of this.

Photos courtesy of Pacific Coast News, Getty.