Macron has moved into global mode
One of the biggest problems Emmanuel Macron faced when he became President for the first time back in 2017 was the matter of his political identity. He himself said that he was neither right nor left, but the French people were only prepared to swallow that for as long as it took for him to face his first crisis – in this case, the gilets-jaunes.
When the “little people” from the provinces, wearing their high-visibility vests, swarmed into Paris to protest about the price of diesel, which the new government had just increased, Macron was immediately cast as a man of the right. If he had been a leftist, like the previous President François Hollande, he would have asked the police to go easy while he tried to reason with the demonstrators. He would probably have drawn back, just as Jacques Chirac did on countless occasions, earning the affection of voters as the nation’s uncle rather than its boss. But the new guy was having none of that. He reinforced the message that diesel had to go up and gave the the state’s heavies free rein to wade in to prevent the ransacking of the Champs Élysée.
The resulting confrontations, which went on for months, secured for the President the reputation, which he has never since lost, of being an élitist and a hardliner, and therefore a centrist in name only. When he finally scrapped the increase and toured the country proclaiming his adherence to a softer, more populist line, few believed him. It was too late. The damage was done.
Fast forward to his re-election in May of this year and Macron – once a minister in Hollande’s administration – came across as not so much an ideologue as “the incumbent,” bent on establishing his legacy as the third great President of the Fifth Republic, following De Gaulle and Mitterrand.
Along the way, definitions of left and right lost their meaning. However unfairly, what looked to matter most this year to the man taking the salute of the richly caparisoned Republican Guard was that he should be remembered as a person of historical significance who had remoulded France into his own image.
His problem is that France, rather like its largest companies, suffers from strikes, a troubled product base and intense competition. The workers – in his case the people – have no objection to pay rises and extended holidays. For the most part, they don’t even complain when those at the top pay themselves inflated salaries and handsome bonuses. They do, however, react badly to changes to their conditions of employment, in particular the requirement to work longer hours, and to proposed alterations to pension schemes that up to now have allowed them to retire at 57.
Macron #1 tried to bulldoze through his plans for national renewal – the mandate on which he was elected to replace the hapless Hollande. Sadly for him, the gilets-jaunes, a series of crippling rail strikes, Covid-19, the loss of his parliamentary majority and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the latter leading to soaring inflation and threatened energy shortages – came along in an unbroken cascade of misfortune.
Macron did his best to handle each of these crises. He outlasted the gilets-jaunes; rode out the rail strikes; oversaw a reasoned response to the pandemic, tried (and failed) to talk Vladimir Putin out of sending his troops into Ukraine; and (just in time) gave France a restored nuclear platform on which it hopes to sit out the winter fuel crisis.
But in every case, he was responding to, not shaping events. And, having lost his majority in the Assembly, he has also lost control of the political narrative to curmudgeons of left and right who are out not to push through their own legislation – on which they cannot agree and for which they don’t have the numbers – but to discredit and humiliate the President.
Undaunted, at least as far as his public face is concerned, Macron #2 has tried to get on with business as usual, in this case a highly unusual 15 per cent cap on gas and electricity prices, costed at €45 billion (£45.1bn), coupled with changes to the bands at which different levels of income tax are applied aimed at mitigating the impact of inflation.
There is probably little more that he could do – though it is worth noting that, unlike Kwasi Kwarteng in the UK, the finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, has chosen to keep the highest rate of tax at 45 per cent. After two years of Covid relief, the Treasury was bare even before the Ukraine crisis. Accordingly, l’arbre d’argent magique is being shaken with a vigour worthy of Mitterrand. But enough is never enough in France, and the hardliners, egged on by the Jeremy Corbyn-like figure of Jean Luc Mélenchon, are unlikely to rest until there is blood on the streets.
This summer saw record heat waves and water shortages across France which almost certainly sapped the energy of those ready to indulge in the national pastime of angry street protest. But with temperatures dropping and winter on the way, the likelihood is that the Left in particular will seize the chance to show that anger and resentment were only ever in remission and must now be given their head.
Until then, Macron, as if he were a second-term US President, is more and more assuming the guise of responsible global statesman. This month, following the death of the Queen, to whose memory he paid eloquent tribute, he went out of his way to court King Charles, who will now make his first overseas visit to Paris, not Washington. He also sought out Liz Truss at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, assuring her of his very best intentions not only on matters of defence and security, including Ukraine, but in helping resolve remaining issues of Brexit, most pressingly illegal immigration and – one can only hope – the Northern Ireland Protocol.
At the same time, Macron has been to Algiers, bent on resetting relations with France’s least pacified former colony. He has visited the Sahel, explaining to its sceptical leaders that the recent pullback of French troops from Mali does not mean any letup in support for its war against Islamist aggression. Less surprisingly, he spoke at length with Joe Biden in New York, doubtless glossing over the serial fiasco of his appearances at Putin’s Big Table just as Biden will have held off recounting his country’s chaotic retreat from Kabul.
The global part is easy – though also easy to forget unless accompanied by some identifiable progress that comes with the logo Fabriqué en France. What really matters is what happens on the domestic front and the signs here are that Macron is reconciled second time around to keeping the show on the road and being grateful for small mercies. Jacques Chirac – still best remembered for not taking France into the American-led invasion of Iraq – would surely nod his head in approval.
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