Thank the elderly for keeping Europe’s extremists out of power

IF EMMANUEL MACRON, the youngest-ever president of France’s Fifth Republic, gets to keep his job he will have its oldest voters to thank. Had only the ballots of those under 60 been counted in the first round on April 10th, Mr Macron would have come third—leaving France to pick between extremists of the left and right in the run-off a fortnight later. Across Europe, many mainstream leaders owe their jobs to a grey-haired (and no-haired-at-all) electoral bulwark loyally trudging to the polls. They will not be around for ever. Either today’s youngsters will have to mellow into the middle ground as they age, or Europe will drift away from the predictable centrism it has comfortably espoused for decades.

In Europe as elsewhere, voters’ preferences were supposed to follow a predictable pattern as they aged. Brimming with idealism and compassion their parents apparently lacked, younger citizens tended to lean left. As they got older, took out a mortgage and discovered the pleasures of income taxation, the right’s appeal became more obvious. But this ideological drift often took place within the same political party. “Big tent” affairs like Germany’s centre-right CDU, or PSOE on Spain’s centre-left, contained factions that could accommodate just about everyone from bleeding hearts to the fiscally righteous. (Americans and Brits will also be familiar with, in essence, two-party systems spiced up by the occasional and usually marginal interloper.)