Isolated, Macron is even more dangerous

The French president is facing trouble at home, and in his attempts to punish Britain for Brexit

Pity, if you can, the beleaguered Emmanuel Macron as he embarks on the last six months of what he still hopes will be the first of two presidential terms. In recent weeks, he has endured repeated losses of face in his endeavours at home and abroad – something that is taken more seriously in France than in Britain, especially in an electoral year. His reactions, each time, have been more peevish than statesmanlike – something his political rivals have made capital out of, even when they agreed with his gripes.

Meanwhile, in a suddenly enlivened presidential race, Macron’s former Brussels Brexit negotiator, the sobre (some say boring) Michel Barnier, no longer faithful to the Elysée line, has thrown his hat into the ring for the Républicain nomination by attacking the very European principles, specifically on the pre-eminence of ECJ rulings over French law, that once made him so effective against the British teams. While Macron yields to woke pressure to condemn the killing of pro-independence Algerian demonstrators in 1961 – a historically founded move nonetheless calculated to win him ethnic minority votes next year – Barnier demands a five-year full moratorium on immigration into France.

It’s been more than a month, but le President is still smarting from Australia’s about-face, after years of negotiations, in dropping an €56 billion French submarine contract in favour of a British-australian-american consortium. It’s not just the considerable loss to the French exchequer at a time when the national debt tops 130 per cent of GDP. Or the refusal, by an “Anglo-saxon” consortium, to acknowledge that France has an Indo-pacific presence, with French départements dotted across the area, giving her the largest expanse of territorial waters on the planet. It’s the obvious lack of trust in France’s reliability as a geostrategic partner in an alliance to contain China. All which makes some sense, but is diminished by regular bouts of presidential petulance.

Over the past four-and-a-half years, Macron, a man more enamoured of intellectual pyrotechnics than of any grounded political stance, has tried to be all things to every voting bloc of the spectrum, to the extent that two wags created the Macron Bingo meme, with boxes containing presidential quotes. It includes his claim that France committed “crimes against humanity” during the colonisation of Algeria (2016) to praising the Vichy puppet leader, Marshall Petain, as a “great soldier” (2018); or that France is la start-up nation of entrepreneurs (2017) but needs a grand Nine-year Plan to rebuild her technological industries with massive top-down state investment (2021). Yet the one thing on which Macron has never varied is Europe.

But even in Brussels, he is increasingly isolated. Macron is still, surprisingly, taking Brexit personally after five years, probably because he has consistently staked a good deal of his political capital on Europe. He has sought to play tough with the British on fishing and had hoped the EU would play along. But his minister for the sea, Annick Girardin, had her first sharply

Ann Elisabeth Moutet on Twitter @moutet;

worded French ultimatum on fishing licences softened in Brussels before 11 coastal EU members agreed to sign a common document to try to find a solution to the fish wars in the Channel 10 days ago. Yet yesterday morning there was more talk of a new two-week “ultimatum” to the Jersey fishing regulators.

This, to say the least, is not popular in Brussels. Macron increasingly appears to the dour commissioners and their careful Brexit policy advisers as the rash subaltern, always ready to push matters to the coup d’éclat. The EU don’t believe in the Count Schlieffen doctrine of being able to wage a war on two fronts. Their primary concern is the Northern Ireland Protocol, the peril of seeing a resurgence of the Troubles, and the serious potential damage to Ireland, a fellow EU nation, if it falls apart. Their position is that a handful of licences for an industry that represents only 0.06 per cent of France’s economy and 0.1 per cent of the UK’S is not the hill anyone should die on, and France is making an inordinately loud fuss. This voice of reason doesn’t seem to be heard in Paris.

The result is that Macron’s long-time dream of becoming Angela Merkel’s anointed successor as the de facto leader of the EU is fast vanishing.