Story highlights Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen in the second round of France's presidential election

Edward Lucas: But his battle shows the fragility of a political system that can be easily exploited by outside powers like Russia

Edward Lucas is a senior editor at The Economist, where he was the Moscow bureau chief from 1998 to 2002. He is also senior vice president at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington think tank. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own

(CNN) Here's the way Western democracies are supposed to work. Populist parties -- the ones that offer incendiary, crowd-pleasing answers -- belong on the fringes. Elections are fought between mainstream parties, which are big coalitions of idealists and pragmatists, reflecting well-structured social and economic interests. The outcome is decided by voters, not by foreign interference.

Not any more. What we are now seeing -- most recently in France -- is competition between the political mainstream, coalescing behind a single candidate, and its anti-systemic competitors.

The old coalitions are breaking down. The parties that once dominated politics are imploding. And a big -- although not yet decisive role -- has been played by an outsider, in the form of Russia and its leaking of stolen e-mails.

It was a similar story in America, where the establishment (including a large slice of "Never Trump" Republicans) largely supported Hillary Clinton. But Donald Trump was able to beat her. Despite being a dodgy tycoon, he managed to crystallize public rage against a system dominated by dodgy rich people. Russian leaking of the Clinton campaign's e-mails helped too.

The same tide of rage against an unfair system and its smug beneficiaries, coupled with Russian interference, has been running strongly in France. It did not surge all the way up the beach because Emmanuel Macron was a much better candidate that Clinton. He was not part of a political dynasty. He was an outsider, of a kind. He did not reek of entitlement. His message of Europhile liberalism and modernization was considerably more inspiring than Clinton's, which was a barely disguised "it's my turn."

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