Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the television series based on it, have won fans among Americans afraid of President Donald Trump’s perceived misogyny and authoritarianism.

But her vision of a future with rampant sterility and reliance on surrogates to propagate may also apply to Europe, where much is being made of the fact that the “commanders,” as Atwood calls political leaders, are unable to have children.

The election of Emmanuel Macron as the new French president now means that the leaders of the four European countries in the G-7 biggest economies — Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Theresa May, and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni — are all childless.

Other prominent European leaders also have no children — Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Does this mean anything?

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Those calling attention to it seem to think so. George Weigel, writing this week in the First Things website, talks of “Catholic Lite and Europe’s demographic suicide.” Earlier this month, James McPherson headlined his commentary in the Washington Examiner “Emmanuel Macron and the barren elite of a changing continent.” And late last month, even before Macron’s victory, Britain’s Sunday Times carried a long book excerpt by Douglas Murray with the title “Europe signs its own death warrant.”

Their arguments tend to be based in conservative notions of religion and culture, and inevitably in the context of Europe are tinged with racist and anti-immigrant overtones. They are implicitly or expressly anti-abortion and lament the secularism and materialism of Western culture.

Total fertility rates in Europe are well below the 2.1 that is considered the “replacement rate” — that is, the number of children needed per childbearer to keep population steady — in most of the major countries.

But they are low in many Asian countries as well. In the U.S., total fertility runs slightly lower than the replacement rate but is buoyed by higher rates of fertility among immigrants than among “native born.”

Atwood’s dystopian vision of infertility, like that depicted in the 1992 novel “Children of Men” by P.D. James (made into a 2006 film by Alfonso Cuarón, starring Clive Owen), is a cautionary tale of where all this could lead.

The commentators who read something into the childlessness of these leaders see risks not only for the individual but for European civilization as a whole.

McPherson, for instance, feels that the individuals who have no children lack the first-hand experience of a “daily confrontation with free will” — children think and act differently than their parents want them to.

“Political leaders without this experience of parenthood may be susceptible to the idea that people are blank-slates, interchangeable units of human capital,” he says.

This has consequences for the countries they lead, this commentator feels. “In Europe today, those without progeny are enacting policies that impact the posterity of others,” McPherson says. “Do childless political leaders have skin in the game long-term?”

For Murray, whose book is titled “The Strange Death of Europe,” it is a morally weakened continent that cannot possibly cope with the influx of millions of refugees from different cultures.

“The world is coming into Europe at precisely the moment that Europe has lost sight of what it is,” Murray says in the Sunday Times excerpt. “And while the movement of millions of people from other cultures into a strong and assertive culture might have worked, the movement of millions of people into a guilty, jaded and dying culture cannot.”

The brave talk of reinvigorating Europe to assimilate the immigrants, Murray feels, will end in failure. “If Europe is going to become a home for the world, it must search for a definition of itself that is wide enough to encompass the world,” the author says.

These concerns may be misplaced, however. After all, it is European leaders like Merkel and Macron who in their actions and deeds are much more committed to addressing climate change — surely the fact that has the greatest impact on posterity – than Trump with his children and grandchildren, not to mention other Republican leaders who deny the science of climate change.

Macron may turn out to be the stalking horse for oligarchic interests that some critics suspect, but for the moment he does seem to be lifting the spirits of French voters and may well get the parliamentary majority he needs for long-term reforms, in spite of starting a new party from scratch.

It may just be coincidence that these political leaders have no children, or it may indeed be part of a fertility trend line that results not just from loss of faith or culture but evolving concepts of gender identity and relationships. There is no reason to think they are not as socially conscious as the next person.

Ultimately it is the voters — the majority of whom do have children and a vested interest in posterity — who sign on for these leaders and their programs. We don’t live in a world — at least not yet — where the “commanders” rule by diktat.