Paris (CNN) When French President Emmanuel Macron won the presidential election in May 2017, beating Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right National Front, the markets heaved a sigh of relief.

The populist wave that had led the United Kingdom to vote to leave the European Union and that propelled Donald Trump to the White House appeared to have been stopped -- at least in France.

Macron embraced this victory and presented himself as the new leader of the free world: a champion of a newly unfashionable multilateralist, globalist vision.

Having changed the French political landscape with his candidacy, which he ran on the independent ticket "En Marche," Macron promised to fix Europe, fight climate change, stand up to the US and take on the populists gaining ground elsewhere in the EU.

So it is perhaps surprising that he should have been so slow to see the populist threat growing from within.

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