Chronic. They are crazy, these French. Seen from London, the spectacle has something comforting, six years after the Brexit vote for which half of the British continue to bite their fingers: to observe the voters across the Channel seized by doubt and tempted by the sirens separatists , there is no small pleasure. But on the continent, the choice offered in France on April 24 is perplexing: why would the French want to get rid of a president who, seen from the outside, has been one of the most active leaders on the European scene for five years, sometimes to the point of irritating his partners?
A few days before the second round of the presidential election, the reasons why a Marine Le Pen presidency would be disastrous for France’s place in Europe and in the world are known and abundantly exposed. Less attention has been paid to deciphering the impact, by the same yardstick, of a second term for Emmanuel Macron.
Europe, he says, is in his DNA. In 2017, he was elected on the starred blue flag, the very one that Marine Le Pen promises to remove from the official photo if she enters the Elysée. Macron the European? Five years later, its EU partners are more aware of the progress made than its fellow citizens. We asked four European personalities, from different geographical and political backgrounds, ministers or former ministers, what role President Macron has played and could still play in Europe. They are not stalwarts; Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and ex-head of Swedish diplomacy, for example, was very critical of certain orientations of Macron’s policy. But at the time of the balance sheet, their verdict is clear.
The speech of the Sorbonne has borne fruit
The speech from the Sorbonne, delivered on September 26, 2017 and which was intended to be the European roadmap of the Macron presidency, had made smile among the Twenty-Seven as it was teeming with proposals. Struggling with her own elections and her coalition negotiations, Angela Merkel had delayed six months before responding. In retrospect, however, this discourse has borne fruit, judge our interlocutors. In two areas, mainly: the idea of strategic autonomy and economic solidarity as an instrument of resilience in the face of crises.
On this second point, the gigantic European recovery plan adopted in July 2020 to deal with the economic crisis caused by the pandemic remains a major step forward for Europe; Emmanuel Macron is credited with a crucial role. For Franziska Brantner, elected from the German Greens, now State Secretary in the large Ministry of Economy and Climate Action of Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, “the initiatives taken by Emmanuel Macron to break Angela Merkel’s immobility have been absolutely necessary, above all to increase the EU’s capacity for action and resilience” in the face of multiple crises, geopolitical, climatic and health. Among these French initiatives, Mme Brantner cites the Sorbonne speech, the proposal to appoint Ursula von der Leyen as Commission President, the agreement on European targets for climate protection and the recovery plan.
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