What the commentators said
For all Macron’s optimistic talk of “the turn of a new page”, said Leo Mckinstry in the Daily Mail, it’s hard to see him turning France around. Every president for the past 30 years has come in “preaching the language of reform”, only to be defeated. Unemployment is running at just under 10%, more than double the UK rate; the youth rate is about 24%. Almost a quarter of the workforce is employed in the public sector, where absenteeism is rife: a 2014 survey found that, on top of holidays, these workers take nearly a month off each year, on average. Huge vested interests resist any attempt to reform rules such as the 35-hour working week.
Macron has vowed to take on these vested interests, said John Lichfield on Capx, so we should stand by for “epic demonstrations and strikes in a French summer of discontent”. If history is anything to go by, he’ll be “widely hated” by the end of his first year. But perhaps history won’t repeat itself. Macron is a new, centrist sort of president. And unlike his recent predecessors, he has “inherited a gently improving French, and European, economic climate”.
Macron has a favourable economic wind behind him, agreed Wolfgang Münchau in the FT. What’s more, even if his party doesn’t win a majority in next month’s parliamentary elections, he should, with the help of the Republicans, be “able to forge a coalition that delivers reforms to the public sector and fiscal consolidation”. The “bigger uncertainty” is whether he’ll be able to deliver on his pledge to reinvigorate the European Project. He wants closer integration, with a common finance ministry and budget for the eurozone, and the mutualisation of debt. That plan won’t go down so well in Germany, which is worried about having to pick up the bill for other states’ profligacy. Macron has called “Berlin’s bluff”, said Ambrose Evans-pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. German officials often deflect questions about EU integration by arguing that they can’t accept radical proposals until other states put their house in order. “Whether Germany’s real motive is to protect its mercantilist interests as a creditor power and run the monetary union to suit itself is conveniently never put to the test.” Now, perhaps, it might be.