WHEN he passed the lingerie shop, the minister hesitated. It was not on the schedule. But the store manager insisted, and Emmanuel Macron, France’s young economy minister, found himself greeting astonished shoppers as they leafed through piles of lace-trimmed bras. By the time he made it out, a crowd had gathered, some eager for selfies, others for a chance to unload their discontent. He lingered and listened. “It’s rare to see a minister stop to talk to people like us,” said one woman. A young man agreed: “He’s a fighter. He knows what he wants and he wants to make a difference.”
Mr Macron is the face of France’s youngest political movement, En Marche! (“On the Move!”), which he launched earlier this year as a platform for a possible bid for the presidency in 2017. Although a member of President François Hollande’s Socialist government since 2014, Mr Macron insists that his new movement is “neither on the right nor the left”. Rather, it is a response to a new fault line that is emerging in Western liberal democracies confronted with the rise of populist nationalism. “The new political split is between those who are afraid of…