The issue isn’t that France’s President Emmanuel Macron won re-election. It’s that he won easily with 58.5% of the vote. His nemesis, right-wing autocrat Marine Le Pen, lost convincingly, which was not a foregone conclusion. What we sometimes forget, because history’s memory is shorter than we would like, is that capitalism and democracy are hard to beat. The Soviet Union lost fair and square, both economically and politically. Vladimir Putin may try to resurrect it through dictatorship. Le Pen may try to lean towards it in France as some elected officials have tried here, but the arc of history, although bumpy at times, does tend to favor economic free enterprise and political freedom.
Originally posted for the Orlando Sentinel’s Central Florida 100.
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