THE LAST PRESIDENT OF EUROPE
EMMANUEL MACRON’S RACE TO REVIVE FRANCE AND SAVE THE WORLD
WILLIAM DROZDIAK
Little, Brown, 256pp, £20
This account of how President Macron has bounced back after his bruising encounter with the Gilets Jaunes is, said Ben Hall in the Financial Times, ‘a tidy primer on Mr Macron’s sophisticated world view’. For Kirkus Reviews it was a ‘slim but pertinent on-the-ground narrative’.
Macron is unpopular in France, where his views for increasing solidarity in the Eurozone and on reducing the French dependence on a bloated state are viewed by many with hostility. Hall thought that the pandemic (which happened after publication) changed the global picture – ‘It is, as the president put it in a recent televised address, “a chance to reinvent ourselves, me first of all”.’ Drodziak, expert in European politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, is a Macron admirer but his title ‘ The Last President’ suggests that his project to drive the re-energisation of Europe via reform in France may fail. In the Washington Post, Benjamin Haddad had his doubts. ‘After a decade of crises, the EU seems like it will emerge from this moment more vulnerable, and the risk of a new upsurge in Euroscepticism is high.’
Simon Nixon of the Times, praising a ‘readable, balanced and insightful analysis’, put Macron in a nutshell. ‘No other contemporary world leader has commanded such attention, other than Donald Trump. Like the US president, Macron fascinates because he is a disrupter, a political neophyte who smashed the old party system on his path to an improbable victory. But whereas Trump is an America First
isolationist, Macron is an internationalist who believes that European civilisation is at stake in a crumbling world order.’