France is a much more left-leaning country than America. Furthermore, their presidential elections include a lot of different candidates from different parties who get a pretty wide spread of the vote.
However, in the main vote where you literally can only choose one or the other, that more left-leaning country is overwhelmingly going to reject the crazy right-winger.
Macron has a lot of domestic problems in France. I don't know how many people listened to his victory speech, but he sounded like a lot of our moderate Republicans in the things he was saying, particularly on economic policies. He's going to pull the country further right than it has been.
However, he's not Le Pen, which makes a huge difference. A lot of people on the left in that country had no choice. Macron with everything he's got going on, or the hard right.
America and France are also profoundly different in how their government is organized. They're a much more centralized system. Our system of federalism with a massive dose of states' rights can largely insulate us from the consequences of a federal election. People who live in California don't feel a Republican president as viscerally as the average French citizen would feel Le Pen.
France and America is apples and oranges, basically.
= new reply since forum marked as read
