Herbert Kitschelt interviewed on political ideology in French Election for The Washington Post

The selection of Macron and Le Pen for the runoff may be a harbinger of a more far-reaching transformation of the French party system. Scholars like MIT political scientist Suzanne Berger have long argued that as globalization, European integration and immigration have become increasingly salient, the traditional anchors of the French party system, such as class and race, are giving way to a new political cleavage centered on France’s relationship to the outside world — on whether France is an open or a closed society, globalized or nationalist. The runoff between Macron and Le Pen would seem to offer precisely such a battle. Another take offered by Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke University, is that the terms of political competition are shifting: Whereas left voters traditionally combined statist economics with a more liberal, tolerant approach to social issues (racial equality, legalization of divorce and abortion, etc.), and right voters combined liberal economics with a more authoritarian approach to social issues, voters are increasingly gravitating toward either liberal positions on both economics and societal issues (immigration, LGBTQ rights, the place of Islam, etc.) or authoritarian positions on both sets of issues. Macron the liberal and Le Pen the authoritarian would seem to incarnate this new alignment. Of course, voters may just be flocking to Macron and Le Pen out of dissatisfaction with recent governments, as opposed to ideological conversion; it will take more than one election to find out. Either way, the foundations of party politics in France appear shakier than at any moment in recent history.