Flagging democracies find inspiration in Ukraine

At first, when the results of French presidential elections were announced on Sunday evening, there came a great, yogic exhalation: a sense of relief in Washington and other Western capitals that President Emmanuel Macron had defeated Marine Le Pen, a far-right populist with a soft spot for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

There followed newly intensified efforts to give Ukraine the weapons it needs to beat back Mr. Putin’s 2-month-old invasion. Kyiv’s Western allies have found inspiration in Ukraine’s courage and its message that democracy is worth fighting and dying for.

But a deeper lesson of the French elections has surfaced: Ms. Le Pen, an anti-system candidate who is deeply skeptical of both NATO and the European Union, won more than 40% of the vote, the most ever for a far-right figure in France. Like the United States, France is facing deep political divisions and broad disaffection.

If Ukraine is showing that democracy matters, the task of political leaders in Washington and Paris – and in many other capitals – is to demonstrate that democracy still works.

The specific pressures and grievances vary from country to country. But they’re rooted in a mix of economic, social, cultural, and ethnic fissures that seem to be making it ever harder for political leaders to gather their citizens around a shared sense of national purpose and policy.

For now at least, Mr. Putin’s attack on Ukraine and the Ukrainians’ defiant resistance have been proving an exception to that rule. Even Ms. Le Pen denounced the Russian invasion during her election campaign. In other European countries, Ukraine’s cause has united rival politicians and millions of ordinary citizens.

In the United States as well, the war has revived a phenomenon that had all but disappeared in recent years: across-the-aisle cooperation in Washington.

Still, if only because the war seems certain to spark steep rises in energy and consumer prices – always difficult for governments to navigate – it is unclear how long this unity will last.

In the U.S., keystone of the Western coalition, the opposing political tribes are already gearing up for midterm congressional elections later this year, with polls suggesting that President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party could well lose control of both chambers.

So can the U.S. president, Mr. Macron in France, and other leaders heal what ails their democratic politics?

It won’t be easy, and it’s bound to take time. But the first step would seem to be an effort to understand the sources of such widespread disaffection, disengagement, and disagreement.

Economic grievances are a part of it. But actually, both the U.S. and French economies have so far proved remarkably resilient in weathering COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, especially when it comes to preserving and creating jobs.

Michel Euler/AP

Supporters of far-right leader Marine Le Pen react to news that she had lost Sunday's presidential election to incumbent Emmanuel Macron. But her high vote share pointed to deep fractures in French society.

Nor does the main catalyst seem to be any particular policy. In France and in the U.S., large numbers of voters who would stand to benefit from policies espoused by Presidents Macron or Biden have still been gravitating to politicians openly, and often angrily, opposed to them.

This anger may be the key: There seems to be a sense of deep, indiscriminate distrust, and resentment, of government. A sense of alienation – the very antithesis of Abraham Lincoln’s famous description of democracy as being “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

So maybe the primary challenge – not just for incumbent presidents or prime ministers, but also opposition politicians whose participation will be essential to any true healing – is to begin reaching out to the angry and alienated people. Talking to them. Listening. Mr. Macron has promised to do more of that in his second term.

The rub, of course, is that none of this is likely to address the short-term imperative of maintaining a unified Western front in backing Ukraine’s resistance to Mr. Putin’s invasion.

But as Western leaders seek to meet that immediate challenge, they may come across an irony: The remedy for their longer term domestic ills may lie not only in Washington or Paris or wherever, but in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

And their best advocate? Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Under daily Russian assault, he has consistently delivered a message intended to resonate far beyond the borders of Ukraine, in other democracies where people have the luxury of taking their freedoms for granted.

His countrymen and women, Mr. Zelenskyy says, aren’t risking their lives only for Ukraine, but for values shared in Europe and the wider world.

“We’re fighting for freedom,” he told visiting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen earlier this month, “for the right to choose, the right to defend, to be born and to live in a free state.”