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PAGE 14 | CULTURE
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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | TUESDAY, MAY 9, 2017
A new hope
for Europe’s
road ahead
Politics
drives epic
assembly
line project
Why Macron won
NEWS ANALYSIS
PARIS
Luck, political skill
and France’s dark past
gave centrist a victory
FROM THE MAGAZINE
BY ADAM NOSSITER
Roger Cohen
OPINION
It’s not just that Emmanuel Macron
won and will become, at the age of 39,
France’s youngest president. It’s not
merely that he defeated, in Marine Le
Pen, the forces of xenophobic nationalism exploited by President Donald
Trump.
It’s that he won with a bold stand for
the much-maligned European Union,
and so reaffirmed the European idea
and Europe’s place in a world that
needs its strength and values.
This, after Britain’s dismal decision
last year to leave the European Union,
and in the face of Trump’s woeful antiEuropean ignorance, was critical.
Macron underlined his message by
coming out to address his supporters
in Paris accompanied by the
Hold the
European anMarseillaise!
them,
It’s time for
Beethoven’s
“Ode to Joy,”
“Ode to Joy.”
rather than the
Macron’s
Marseillaise — a
election is
powerful gesture
a powerful
of openness.
A Le Pen-led
gesture
lurch into a
of openness.
Europe of nationalism and racism
has been
averted. President Vladimir Putin of
Russian backed Le Pen for a reason:
He wants to break down European
unity and sever the European bond
with the United States. Instead, the
center held and, with it, civilization.
A federalizing Europe is the foundation of European postwar stability and
prosperity. It offers the best chance for
young Europeans to fulfill their promise. It is Europeans’ “common destiny,”
as Macron put it in his acceptance
speech, standing before the French
and European Union flags.
To think otherwise is to forget history. No wonder Chancellor Angela
Merkel of Germany, through her
spokesman, immediately proclaimed a
victory “for a strong and united Europe.”
That will require reform. Europe,
complacent, has lost traction. Macron
recognized this. He declared, “I want
to re-weave the bond between citizens
and Europe.” More transparency, more
accountability and more creativity are
required. No miracle ever marketed
itself more miserably than the European Union.
Macron, who came from nowhere in
the space of a year at the head of a
COHEN, PAGE 8
The French presidential runoff transcended national politics. It was globalization against nationalism. It was the
future versus the past. Open versus
closed.
But in his resounding victory on Sunday night, Emmanuel Macron, the centrist who has never held elected office,
won because he was the beneficiary of a
uniquely French historic and cultural
legacy, where many voters wanted
change but were appalled at the type of
populist anger that had upturned politics in Britain and the United States. He
trounced the far-right candidate Marine
Le Pen, keeping her well under 40 percent, even as her aides said before the
vote that anything below that figure
would be considered a failure.
His victory quickly brought joy from
Europe’s political establishment, especially since a Le Pen victory would have
plunged the European Union into crisis.
But in the end, Mr. Macron, only 39, a
former investment banker and an uninspired campaigner, won because of luck,
an unexpected demonstration of political skill, and the ingrained fears and
contempt that a majority of French people still feel toward Ms. Le Pen and her
party, the National Front.
For the past year, a pressing political
question has been whether widespread
public frustration against Western political establishments had morphed into
a global populist movement. Britain’s
vote to leave the European Union last
June, followed by the presidential election of Donald J. Trump in the United
States, created the impression of a
mounting wave. Ms. Le Pen, stalwart of
the European far right, was the next
truly big test.
But Ms. Le Pen’s challenge was different because French history is different.
She has spent the last six years as president of the National Front single-mindedly focused on one objective: erasing
the stain of her party’s association with
the ex-collaborationists, right-wing extremists, immigrant-hating racists and
anti-Semites who founded it 45 years
ago.
She knew — as her father, the party
patriarch Jean-Marie Le Pen, always refused to acknowledge — that she would
always be a minority candidate as long
as she reminded the French of perhaps
the greatest stain in their history, the
four years of far-right rule during World
War II. Inside and outside the party this
process was called “un-demonization”
— a term suggesting the demons still
associated with her party. The French
do not want them back.
“There was no choice. I couldn’t vote
for Le Pen. You’re not going to vote for
the extremist,” said Martine Nurit, 52, a
small-restaurant owner who had just
cast her ballot in Paris’s 20th Arrondissement on Sunday. She had voted for
Confluence of forces
prompted Airbus to
build factory in Alabama
BY BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
The ships from Hamburg, Germany,
steam into Mobile Bay in Alabama several times a month. Loaded upon them
are the titanic parts of flying machines:
tails, already painted; wings, already
functional; the fuselage, in two segments, front and rear.
The pieces are set on flatbed trucks
and escorted by police cars to a decommissioned Air Force base, Brookley
Field, about four miles from the harbor.
There, between the runways, the European aerospace company Airbus has
built a $600 million factory to assemble
airplanes in the United States.
It’s an odd arrangement for many reasons, not least among them Airbus’s
ability to assemble its planes almost
anywhere. The finished product is easy
to move (it flies), and the hardest work
of making it is buried in its components.
The vertical stabilizer is made in Getafe,
Spain. The wings come from Broughton,
Wales. The front of the fuselage is made
in Saint-Nazaire, France; the back, in
Hamburg.
What happens in Mobile doesn’t resemble manufacturing so much as the
assembly of a particularly large and
tremendously complicated piece of Ikea
furniture. The American workers attach
the pieces of the airplane using tools and
connectors, many of which are also imported from Europe.
Many of the supervisors come from
the Continent, too; the Mobile factory
manager was raised about 10 miles from
the wing plant in Wales. And the company says that it saves no money by
building planes in Mobile.
But Airbus has contorted its supply
chain to end at an old military base in
southern Alabama precisely because it
can now build airplanes anywhere. In
this it resembles many of the world’s
largest manufacturers, which now tend
to be global operations that pull together components from hundreds of factories in dozens of countries to create
products sold around the world. And
AIRBUS, PAGE 10
PATRICK KOVARIK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Emmanuel Macron demonstrated a quality that French voters have long found essential: cool mastery of the country’s critical issues.
the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round, on April 23, and it
was with “not an ounce of joy” that she
voted for the “business-oriented” Mr.
Macron in the second.
“Mostly, I voted against Le Pen,” she
said.
In the end Ms. Le Pen failed to “undemonize,” spectacularly. She failed
during the course of the campaign,
when her angry rallies drew the Front
inexorably back into the swamp from
which it had emerged. And then she
failed decisively in one of the campaign’s critical moments, last week’s debate with Mr. Macron, when she effectively “re-demonized” herself and the
party, as many French commentators
noted.
It was an hourslong tirade against Mr.
Macron, laced with name-calling and
epithets, and woefully deficient in substance. She appeared lost on subject after subject, fumbling on one of her signature issues — withdrawing from the
euro — that is opposed by a majority of
French. Something essential about Ms.
Le Pen, and the National Front, had
been revealed to France.
FRANCE, PAGE 4
CHRISTOPHER PAYNE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Airbus parts at the aircraft company’s
$600 million factory in Alabama.
Shedding her guilt and discomfort
LOS ANGELES
Gabourey Sidibe wants
memoir to be the last
word about her body
BY PENELOPE GREEN
On the night the director Lee Daniels offered Gabourey Sidibe the lead in “Precious,” the role that would earn her an
Oscar nomination, Mr. Daniels asked if
she had a boyfriend. Ms. Sidibe, then a
24-year-old psychology major whose
training as an actor had been confined to
her work as a phone-sex operator, as
well as roles in college productions of
“Peter Pan” and “The Wiz,” answered
tartly.
“No,” Ms. Sidibe told him, “but now
that I’m going to be a movie star, I’m going to get pregnant by a basketball player and lock down that child support.” Mr.
Daniels cracked up, and the deal was
sealed.
Y(1J85IC*KKNMKS( +$!z!$!#!}
MALIN FEZEHAI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The actress Gabourey Sidibe, whose
sarcasm is on display in her new memoir,
“This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare.”
“Sarcasm is my birth defect,” Ms.
Sidibe, now 33, said recently. “I was born
cynical.”
Like many smart young women
whose precociousness put them at odds
with their peers — by fourth grade, Ms.
Sidibe said, she was an entrenched outlier — sarcasm has been both weapon and
armor. She deployed it to fine effect in
her upside-down household in the Bedford-Stuyvesant
neighborhood
of
Brooklyn, where she and her older
brother were raised by their warm,
Southern mother and stern African father, whose family traditions extended
to polygamy — “I know!” Ms. Sidibe
said — and who called his firstborn
daughter “fatso,” as did her relatives,
while outlining her future as a good
Muslim wife.
Her sarcasm is on rueful display in
her new memoir, “This Is Just My Face:
Try Not to Stare” (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt), in which she writes of trying
to please a father for whom she is too
American, too vivid and altogether too
much. Her parents married when her father, who trained as an architect and
worked as a taxi driver, offered to pay
her mother to marry him so that he
could apply for a green card. A year later, she fell in love with her paper husband. “That’s right!” Ms. Sidibe writes.
“My mother is so classy that you have to
marry her and then wait a year before
she gives you any play.”
She writes of her panic when they divorced, and her mother gave up her
teaching career to become a subway
singer, at the same time that the family
of three moved into a single room of her
aunt’s Harlem townhouse. (They would
later move to a studio apartment
nearby, where all three shared a bunk
bed.)
Ms. Sidibe’s aunt is Dorothy Pitman
Hughes, a founder of Ms. Magazine; a
famous portrait from 1971, of Ms. Pitman
Hughes and Gloria Steinem raising
their fists in a Black Power salute, hung
in her sitting room, where Ms. Sidibe
passed it every day on her way to school,
and Ms. Steinem was a regular guest.
While Ms. Sidibe averred that she is “a
link on a chain of powerful women,” her
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