by Eric J. Lyman
Once hailed as a prototype European leader, Macron now appears to be the last remaining champion of Europe's battered liberal center
When Emanuel Macron was first elected French president nearly a decade ago, he looked like the prototype of Europe’s next generation of leaders: young, reform-minded, pro-market, pro-European, strategic, not clearly on the right or the left.
Macron is still ambitious internationally, but at home he is term limited, with falling approval levels, and looking increasingly like the last remaining champion of Europe’s battered liberal center.
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has resigned amid populist pressure at home. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is struggling as the country’s right wing strengthens. Giorgia Meloni of Italy, who heads Europe’s most stable government in a major country, comes from the right. And in Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is trapped by domestic storms.
That has left the 48-year-old Macron, whose term as president ends in 2027, alone in trying to hold the traditional European center together with speeches about Europe’s strategic autonomy and liberal centrism.
“He’s politically unpopular at home, yet I think [Macron] is sort of winning the overall battle of ideas about Europe’s trajectory,” Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters.
Rym Momtaz, a geopolitical consultant with Carnegie Europe, was more critical: “He has ‘thought leadership’ but he doesn’t always have ‘action leadership,’” Momtaz said.
That was in evidence at the recently completed Group of Seven leaders’ summit in Évian-les-Bains, where host France offered a compressed version of the tail end of Macron’s presidency, including grand staging, ambitious language and at least a little real diplomatic movement.
On paper, the G7 gave something to brag about: leaders emerged with broad declarations on support for Ukraine in the country’s four-year-old war against Russia, sanctions against Moscow, cooperation on the trade of critical minerals, the need for regulation of artificial intelligence, migration, and drug trafficking.
Perhaps most importantly, after months of European anxiety about Washington’s reliability, U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to move a little on Ukraine. Macron said Friday that Trump agreed that the U.S. was “no longer a neutral mediator” between Russia and Ukraine, instead “supporting Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Russia confirmed that shift, and Trump at the G7 called Russia the “offensive” party in the conflict, though the U.S. State Department did not formally confirm any change of stance on Ukraine.
At home, Macron is nearing the end of his mandate. He was elected to a
five-year term in 2017, and he won re-election in 2022. But he lost his majority in parliament in 2024, and his centrist movement is now feeling pressure from both directions.
On
the right, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has moved from a protest
party to a plausible leader of the government. And on the left, Jean-Luc
Mélenchon and his party France Unbowed have gained traction and have
pulled support from the center.
In between, the fractured post-Macron camp is led by lesser-known figures who will decide whether “Macronism” can survive with Macron himself on the sidelines.
If that worries Macron, he is not showing it as he continues to push his agenda, such as when he told the Munich Security Conference earlier this year that it was more important than ever for Europe to stand up for itself.
“This is the right time for audacity,” Macron said. “This is the right time for a strong Europe. Europe must learn to become a geopolitical power.”
Eric J. Lyman
Source: https://justthenews.com/world/europe/frances-macron-alone-center-europe
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