Barring some unimagined convulsion, Macron will likely handily win the presidency. Le Pen is just that unacceptable to that many voters. But the day after? Macron is a nimble figure, who can flip a plastic Evian bottle through the air and land it square on its base. But France wants more economic growth and less terrorism—and Macron offers continuity with the economic policies that have crushed the former and the immigration policies that have aggravated the latter. He promises to implement them better: better trade, a better euro, a better social insurance system, and better assimilation of immigrants. He speaks of more flexibility within the existing system—while refraining from reversing any of that system’s major elements, from the 35-hour work week to the 62-year retirement age to the continuing flow of trans-Mediterranean immigration. French political professionals note the emotional power of the issues addressed by Le Pen, especially immigration restriction. Someday, those issues may find a champion who is less ambivalent about such basic ethical questions as, “Was D-Day a good thing?”

Polls found that an absolute majority of French young people supported either Melenchon or Le Pen. Perhaps those two votes can never be joined together: France is a racially and ethnically divided country, and the young glare at each other even more mutually suspicious than do the old. They are united in their discontent, however—and like other handsome Europhile reformers before him, notably Italy’s Matteo Renzi—it’s hard to a path by which Macron assuages them. Macron leads a personal movement, En Marche. He will not command a majority in either house of Parliament. (The Socialists hold 280 of 577 seats in the directly elected National Assembly; the Gaullist-right Republicans 143 of the 348 seats in the indirectly elected Senate.) How does anything get done? Maybe charisma will overcome inertia, as it did when the teenage Macron wooed and won the teacher, 20-plus years his senior, now his wife. Or maybe the odds will prevail, as they usually do. In which case, the upheavals of 2016 will resume in France and elsewhere in Europe.

Every dog has his day, as the saying goes, and the spring of 2017 looks like the day of the over-dog. Nobody should assume that the under-dogs won’t bark again.