Emmanuel Macron won the French election by a landslide (66 percent), beating xenophobic candidate Marine Le Pen and her National Front party. In the French election globalization defeated populism, a more open worldly vision for France defeated the closed, nativist view of the far-right.
Climate change appears to have been a key issue that contributed to Le Pen's defeat. She was forced to change her stance on the issue because unlike her counterpart in the US, French voters would not go along with her climate denial. In 2012 Le Pen said: "I am not sure that human activity is the principal origin of this phenomenon." In an attempt to capture voters she recently revised her position adopting the Republican line saying, "I am not a climate expert, I think that human activity does contribute to a proportion, which I can’t measure, to this phenomenon."
