The reason I still end up coming down on the side of Macron as a net positive (much to the annoyance of left-wingers I know), is that in the wake of an utterly disastrous centre-left collapse he managed to construct a centre/centre-right coalition which is structurally opposed to the far-right
Nathan
Macron is not popular and at the same time he is, IMO, not catastrophically unpopular in the way that both Sarkozy and Hollande were (apart from anything else he actually managed to get re-elected).
And part of this is that he knows who his voters are and has delivered for them.
