In the age of far-right populism, Western elections have gone international.<\/b>
\nFormer President Barack Obama has endorsed his first candidate for office since leaving office \u2014 and it\u2019s not a fellow Democrat. In fact, it\u2019s not even an American. \u201cI am supporting Emmanuel Macron to lead you forward, \u201d Obama said in English in a video addressed to the French people just days before Macron faces far-right candidate Marine Le Pen Sunday in an election that will determine the country\u2019s next president. Obama closes the minute-long video in French. \u201cEn Marche! Vive la France!\u201d The endorsement is highly, highly unusual \u2014 I can\u2019 t think of a time when a former US president explicitly endorsed a candidate in a foreign election. But it makes a lot of sense. Macron and his brand-new En Marche party have campaigned on a post-partisan, center-left technocratic platform \u2014 there are some huge differences, but are already being made in both countries. Macron leaned into the parallel, releasing a video earlier in the campaign of. And indeed, Obama is popular in France \u2014 84 percent of French voters said they had confidence in him to \u201cdo the right thing\u201d when it came to world affairs in a. Most importantly, the video speaks to the ways that politics have changed in the West in the past year. This kind of intervention by a US president in a foreign election would be almost inconceivable if it weren\u2019 t for Le Pen, who is explicitly opposed to everything that Western leaders like Obama traditionally claim to stand for \u2014 integration, tolerance, and international law. She wants to pull out of the EU, close French borders to refugees, and believes that Vladimir Putin\u2019s annexation of Crimea is entirely legal. (Her National Front party has by the Russian government.) The Front, and far-right parties like it, have risen in the polls significantly since the 2015 refugee crisis \u2014 and now represent perhaps the greatest threat to the continued existence of the liberal international order since communism. One of them taking power in a country as vital as France would undermine core institutions like the EU and NATO and create the type of dissension in the Western alliance that hasn\u2019 t been seen in decades. The point, then, is that European elections are increasingly no longer about principally European concerns like the size of welfare states. They are about issues that affect the broader stability of Europe and the global order \u2014 which America has a huge stake in. As a result, center-left politicians like Obama feel entitled, maybe even obligated, to involve themselves.<\/p>\n

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