Emmanuel Macron’s Defeat Would Be a Defeat for Europe
French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris on June 24.
Emmanuel Macron’s political project was always, fundamentally, a European project.
When he claimed a shock presidential election victory in 2017, he celebrated not with France’s national anthem, but with the European Union’s — Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. That was his soundtrack again in 2022 when he won a second term.
From the very beginning of his mandate, he was clear that for France to flourish, the EU must succeed. “This is where our battle lies, our history, our identity, our horizon, what protects us and gives us a future,” he said in a speech at the Sorbonne a few weeks after taking office.
Five years before Vladimir Putin’s tanks started rolling toward Kyiv, he was already calling for the EU to beef up its military spending and centralize its command structures to be better equipped to defend its own interests.
The world has grown more hostile since then. Economically and technologically, it’s lagging behind the US and China and faces difficult trading relationships with both economic superpowers. Russia is slowly advancing on the battlefield in Ukraine and the far right is gaining support in Europe.
Macron’s response to those challenges has been more Europe — combined military forces, joint debt issuance, shared financial regulation — even if he was sometimes slow to surrender French privileges that might have helped to win concessions from his reluctant partners.
When he returned to the Sorbonne in April to revisit those themes, his tone was bleaker. “Our Europe is mortal,” he said. “It can die.”
But it’s the Macron project that’s now on life support.
French voters delivered a shocking rebuke to their president in the European elections on June 9, when his party won less than half the votes of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. Rather than take his medicine, the 46-year-old challenged the French to correct their mistake, dissolving the parliament to trigger another vote before his party had even had chance to regroup.
In the legislative ballot, taking place over two rounds on Sunday and July 7, polls suggest he’s set to suffer a similar defeat. If those projections are correct, it’ll cost him control of the French parliament and effectively bring down the curtain on Macronism with three years of his term still to run.
If that happens, it won’t be because he was wrong.
As that Sorbonne speech from 2017 shows, he was often on the right side of history. And when he wasn’t — such as his insistence on reaching out to Putin even after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — he tried to correct course. Sometimes at least.
If he fails, it will be because he couldn’t convince people to back him when he was right.
His high-conviction style has alienated potential allies in northern and eastern Europe and, latterly, in Berlin, where his relationship with Angela Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, has been barely functional.
Part of the reason why the centrist coalition that brought him to power is falling apart is that many French voters are just sick of their president.
But if they reject Macron the personality, they'll also be rejecting his biggest idea, a vision of Europe, essentially federal in nature, confident in its liberal values, and with the ambition to compete with the world’s biggest powers. — Ben Sills