WHEN he passed the lingerie shop, the minister hesitated. It was not on the schedule. But the store manager insisted, and Emmanuel Macron, France’s young economy minister, found himself greeting astonished shoppers as they leafed through piles of lace-trimmed bras. By the time he made it out, a crowd had gathered, some eager for selfies, others for a chance to unload their discontent. He lingered and listened. “It’s rare to see a minister stop to talk to people like us,” said one woman. A young man agreed: “He’s a fighter. He knows what he wants and he wants to make a difference.”

Mr Macron is the face of France’s youngest political movement, En Marche! (“On the Move!”), which he launched earlier this year as a platform for a possible bid for the presidency in 2017. Although a member of President François Hollande’s Socialist government since 2014, Mr Macron insists that his new movement is “neither on the right nor the left”. Rather, it is a response to a new fault line that is emerging in Western liberal democracies confronted with the rise of populist nationalism. “The new political split is between those who are afraid of globalisation,” he told The Economist, “and those who see globalisation as an opportunity, or at least a framework for policy that tries to offer progress for all.”

His diagnosis is based on France, but applies to other European countries, from Britain to Poland. The old divide between left and right is being eroded by the rise of the National Front (FN), once an extremist fringe party, which seems better able to offer hope to those disillusioned by the political elite and buffeted by globalisation. Under Marine Le Pen, the anti-immigration, Eurosceptic FN has become the most popular party among working-class voters, supported by 43% of them, next to just 20% for the Socialists. She now tops most polls for the first (though not the second) round of next year’s presidential election.

The geography of voting reflects this new divide. Thriving, cosmopolitan cities such as Lyon, Grenoble and Bordeaux, with their smart pedestrian centres, tech hubs and gourmet food, vote for either the left (Lyon) or the centre-right (Bordeaux)—but not for the FN. By contrast, in battered second-tier towns full of betting shops and half-empty cafés, the FN is on the rise. Less than 9% of voters in Grenoble, a centre of high-end scientific research, voted for the FN at municipal elections in 2014. In the same elections Hénin-Beaumont, a town in the former mining basin of northern France, elected its first FN mayor.

Mr Macron calculates that this creates a new political space for progressives who believe in an open and mobile society, including, he says, “those who haven’t benefited from globalisation but are ready for change”. He judges that peeling such voters away from both left and right is a way to confront the conservative forces that push for closed, Eurosceptic, inward-looking solutions. “The biggest challenges facing this country and Europe—geopolitical threats and terrorism, the digital economy, the environment—are not those that have structured the left and the right.”

To this end, Mr Macron has enrolled 16,000 volunteers to knock on doors and gather ideas over the summer, and signed up 50,000 members. His hope is to carry out a different sort of politics, based on direct contact with voters through social media and emerging local networks, in order to respond to political disillusionment. At his first political rally this week in Paris, before a packed audience of about 3,000 supporters, Mr Macron hinted that he might lead the movement into elections next year—but stopped short of declaring his candidacy.

Think positive

In the long run, Mr Macron may be right about the coming shift. Yet his effort raises tough questions. One is whether combining left and right to confront nationalism runs the risk of lending such forces legitimacy. He brushes aside such concerns, pointing out that the FN is already France’s top party in recent voting. His argument is that politicians cannot just fight fear (of immigration or globalisation) with fear (of an FN victory): they need to make a positive case for progress, and equal opportunity, in an open society.

Another question recalls the difficulties experienced by tech start-ups, which Mr Macron champions in the face of protected industries. As so often happens in French business, the incumbent parties may crush Mr Macron before he can disrupt politics. Manuel Valls, the reformist prime minister, who has his own presidential ambitions, is infuriated by Mr Macron’s circumvention of the party system. “This has got to stop,” he huffed earlier this week. It is difficult to see the insubordinate Mr Macron remaining much longer in government.

Outside, however, he will be on his own, and he has never run for elected office. Both right and left plan their own presidential primaries in coming months. It takes a leap of faith to see the space for a serious candidate outside either structure—and, to the frustration of some of his impatient backers, it is unclear whether Mr Macron would run were Mr Hollande, his former boss, to seek re-election.

A final question is whether Mr Macron has what it takes. His inexperience can betray him: in April it led to an embarrassingly gushing photo splash with his wife, his former high-school French teacher and 20 years his senior, in a celebrity magazine. A graduate of the high-flying Ecole Nationale d’Administration, Mr Macron is also a former banker, and thus is distrusted within the Socialist Party. He is loathed by unionists for, among other things, his critique of the 35-hour working week. Polls say Socialist voters would prefer Mr Valls or Mr Hollande as their nominee.

Yet if one polls all French voters, Mr Macron is the favourite. And his cross-party support reaches into unlikely corners. At a recent event for start-ups in the banlieues, Paris’s high-rise suburbs, participants were unbothered by his establishment ties. “We like his message that it’s OK to want to succeed,” said Daniel Hierso, a young black businessman. “In France we never try new things, it’s always the same faces,” said Yacine Kara, an entrepreneur of Algerian origins. “His political inexperience is positive. He’s taking a risk, like us.” Nobody denies that it is a long shot, and could flop badly. But as a response to Europe’s populist convulsions, it is one of the most intriguing attempts around.