We’re only a few days away from the French presidential runoff election and yes, I’m worried. Even though progressive-centrist Emmanuel Macron is leading in the polls and has the backing of much of the French political establishment, it still feels like Marine le Pen could swoop in and Donald Trump the sh-t out of everything. But much like Hillary Clinton’s so-called “likeability problem,” I wonder if there are many French voters who will just fundamentally not vote for a female candidate. Even if feminists are thinking about supporting the woman, there should be no worries: Emmanuel Macron might be your woke feminist hero? You know why? Because he married his high school teacher, a woman who is 25 years older than him. Apparently, French women love that about him.

Emmanuel Macron, the front-runner in Sunday’s French presidential election, shares something with President Trump: a 24-year age gap with his wife. The difference is that Macron’s wife is the older one. That cliché-busting fact — a candidate young enough to be his wife’s son, rather than old enough to be her father — is a little social “revenge” that delights many French women, including Martine Bergossi.

“Why can’t we marry younger men? I date them all the time,” said Bergossi, the stylish owner of Alternatives, a secondhand-couture shop in Paris, who prefers to leave her exact age to the imagination. “It’s normal to see men with younger women,” she said. “So it’s rather great to see the opposite.”

Macron was only 15 when he met Brigitte Trogneux, a married teacher at his high school in northern France who had three children. Macron’s parents sent him to Paris to put distance between the teacher who ran the drama club and their precocious son, but their bond lasted, she divorced, and 10 years ago they were married.

Most of the French women interviewed said a politician’s private life is not a reason to vote either for or against him or her. In the United States, too, Trump’s two divorces, considerable age gap with his third wife, and even a recorded conversation in which he lewdly discussed groping women did not prevent his victory. But just days before the French vote, nearly all women interviewed did say they were more interested in Macron, who was a virtual unknown until recently, because his marriage breaks the mold.

“Did men ask anybody when they started marrying younger women?” asked Karin Lewin, an artist with a studio in Montmartre. “Who sets the rules?”

She likes that Macron is shaking up the men’s political club. So do others. “Every single day, I see an older man with a woman his kids’ age coming into the hotel,” said Chloe Tournadre, 26, who works at a luxury hotel in Paris.

Lilach Eliyahu, a fashion designer, said the fact that Macron has a wife who “has wrinkles and cellulite makes me think of him as a feminist. He is the opposite of Donald Trump.”

[From The Washington Post]

I’m trying to imagine what would happen in America if a young, popular politician – let’s say a 40-year-old JFK type – was married to a woman 24 years older. I’d like to think that people wouldn’t think it was a huge deal, although for me, the creepiness of the story is that they met when she was his high school teacher. WaPo even adds another layer to that, suggesting perhaps that Macron’s parents sent him away because he was obsessed with her? Or maybe they were having a relationship back then? Ew. Yeah, that’s the creepy part.

Also: read this profile of Emmanuel and Brigitte at The Star. Their sources paint the couple as star-crossed lovers who absolutely fell in love with each other when he was 15. The Star says they’ve been together ever since he was 18, when he went back to her (and presumably she had divorced her husband). This whole thing would make a fascinating French movie (I’m dream-casting Isabelle Huppert in a blonde wig for Brigitte) but as a political story… man, this is sordid.

Photos courtesy of Getty.