As autumn approaches, Macron has a new spring in his step

Nothing is more important to whoever happens to occupy the office of President in the Élysée Palace than the perception, at home and abroad, that they have upheld the honour and dignity of France. To Emmanuel Macron, the G7 summit that concluded on Monday in Biarritz was exactly what he needed to kick-start the second half of his troubled mandate.

There was something for everyone. Macron opened the gathering – an annual event that in recent times has suffered from a sense of irrelevance amounting almost to vacuity – with an impassioned attack on the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for his alleged role in burning the Amazonian rain forest. The following day he mounted a spirited defence of his wife, Brigitte, aged 66, after it was revealed that the Brazilian had compared her unflatteringly with his own third wife, 37-year-old Michelle.

Finally, right at the end, there was a genuine coup de theatre in which Donald Trump accepted Macron’s offer to arrange a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, hitherto characterised by the  White House as an extremist who in persisting with his nuclear ambitions was “playing with fire”.

The Amazon intervention, in particular the phrase “our house is burning,” ticked all the climate change boxes, particularly for the young. The indignant response to a crude mockery of his wife will have resonated with women of all ages, while the Frenchman’s discreet handling of Trump, unequalled by any other world leader with the possible exception of North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, impressed just about everyone, including France’s notoriously cynical national press.

There were bonuses, too, on the summit’s margins. Vladimir Putin – excluded from the G7 – flew from Russia to meet Macron at his Mediterranean retreat on the Ile de Brégançon, where the pair discussed the ongoing crises in Ukraine and Syria. And, with October 31 looming ever closer, time was found to discuss Brexit mano a mano with Britain’s Boris Johnson.

If there was, from Macron’s perspective, a downside to what took place, it was the attempt by Trump and Johnson to upstage their host by behaving as a comic version of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But even the duo’s shameless display of anglo-saxon exceptionalism could not detract from the overall sense that it was the French leader who had set both the tone and the agenda of what took place.

Will the deforestation of the Amazon now come to an end? It seems unlikely. Will Trump and Rouhani actually meet, and if they do will anything come of it? Who knows? But the prestige of France, and with it that of Macron, has certainly been enhanced, allowing the President to turn to the third of his co-equal concerns, the future of the EU and French economic growth, with a degree of confidence that just six months ago would have seemed impossible.

Bolstered by the positive response that has greeted his late-summer flowering, Macron is returning to Paris with a renewed determination to stay on top of events. He was badly shaken by the uprising last winter of the gilets-jaunes that for a time looked as if it might turn into a repeat of the events of 1968. In taking to to the streets to demand a citizen-friendly Socialist programme, French workers and their anarchist supporters delivered an emphatic no to the haughty dirigisme, centred on improving the lot of the wealthy, that had marked the President’s first 18 months.

Pundits at the time were quick to predict that the gilet-jaunes’ weekly assaults on the Champs Élysée would leave the President a lame duck, skulking in the palace, afraid to attempt anything radical. And in part they were right. The lofty assumption that France could within five years rival Germany as Europe’s number one economy and effective leader of the EU was never realistic. But at the same time, having made concessions to the protesters and admitted his hubris, Macron seems to have used his summer break to reconfigure his ambition, stripping it down to what can be achieved while at the same time letting go of his “Jupiter”pretensions.

Even before he and Brigitte headed south to Brégançon, he had hosted an event at the Élysée at which he warned his ministers, headed by prime minister Édouard Philippe, to listen more and declaim less, dialling down on interventions while concentrating on getting done those things that might actually make the French feel a little better about themselves and their prospects.

It is probably a sound strategy. France faces any number of problems, economic, social, political and racial, none of which can be solved by either him or his colleagues issuing directives and expecting the voters to do what they are told. Reform in small steps is the new order of the day. Macron will try to mend the economy, keep Europe on track and play his part in international geo-politics without any longer casting himself as “The One,” without whom nothing worthwhile can be achieved.

No doubt there will be further setbacks as winter approaches and his often disgruntled countrymen and women look again to action on the streets as the catalyst for change. No doubt, too, there will be occasional explosions of ego. But second time around, with his re-election campaign coming into tighter focus, the President of neither left nor right might yet come back to dominate the centre-stage.