The Brief – Emmanuel Macron, the lonely man

Some empires take centuries to die. Others fall in a matter of days, like overripe fruit. President Emmanuel Macron is neither a tsar nor a sultan, but he has ruled France unchallenged since 2017 and his time is now running out.

Since announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly on the evening of the European elections on 9 June, the French president has been watching the “new world” he wanted to create crumble around him.

His early allies are starting to abandon ship.

“It was the president of the republic who killed the presidential majority,” former prime minister Edouard Philippe explained a few days ago, calling for the formation of a majority with “a new logic” after the early legislative elections on 30 June and 7 July.

Bruno le Maire, Macron’s minister for economy and finance for seven years, pulled no punches in criticising the cloportes [woodlice] surrounding the president. Le Maire has decided not to run, explaining that “his greatest political battles [are] ahead of [him]”.

Summoned to the front line to try to save what can be saved, and in fact having become the main figure of the majority, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is urging voters to “choose” him in the elections, avoiding any association with a president to whom, in his own words only a short while ago, “he owed everything”.

On the ground, the bravest members of the majority are fighting to save their seats, Others are already packing their bags.

Whatever the outcome of the forthcoming elections – and so far it looks like both the far-right and the left will come out ahead of Macron’s list – the president has given assurances that he will not resign.

He intends to see out his term of office, which runs until 2027, watching from the Élysée Palace the implosion of the French political scene that he himself organised.

The programmes of the hastily arranged left-wing alliance Nouveau Front Républicain (NFP) and the far-right movement Rassemblement National (RN) would lead “to civil war”, he continued to explain in a podcast broadcast on 24 June.

“It won’t be anyone’s fault on the evening of the second round, it will be the French people’s responsibility,” Macron still wants to believe, seemingly ignoring the responsibility he personally took on in 2017 to repel the far right.

Me or chaos, then.

And it would seem that even if it comes down to this choice, him or chaos, a majority of the French are in favour of the second option, which says a lot about the massive rejection of Macron.

No one can predict the shape of the National Assembly that will emerge from the polls on the evening of 7 July, so uncertain is the complex vote transfer equation in the second round, with the possibility of many triangular contests, thanks to the peculiarity of the French electoral system.

But the most credible scenario is one of an impossible majority and an ungovernable country.

At the end of his mandate, Emmanuel Macron will certainly have no trouble “crossing the street” to find a new job, as he advised an unemployed person to do in 2018. But no one knows what France will look like by then.

The Roundup

Dutch politician Mark Rutte was confirmed as the next secretary-general of NATO by the ambassadors of the 32 members of the Western military alliance on Wednesday.

EU leaders should support the cross-border merger of banks to bolster the resilience of the Banking Union, European Commissioner for Financial Services Mairead McGuinness said on Tuesday, warning recent amendments to draft deposit insurance rules risk weakening the very bases of the union.

On the eve of a European Council summit where EU leaders are supposed to seal the deal on EU top jobs, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni sharply criticised the provisional agreement reached by the majority and indicated that she might oppose it.

An association representing the largest European telecom operators threw yet another punch in their intensifying fight with US Big Tech over regulation in Europe, in a position paper published on Wednesday.

EU countries reached a common position on the bloc’s first legislation for the welfare of cats and dogs on Wednesday.

The EU’s flagship CO2 price is significantly influenced by whether industry considers politicians’ climate commitments credible, according to new modelling by researchers.

Many of the proposals put forward in the French national election by the Rassemblement National (RN, ID) and its allies, counter the European greenhouse gas reduction targets set out in the bloc’s Green Deal.  

Diederik Samsom, former right-hand man of Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans, will assume the chairmanship of the supervisory board of Gasunie, the government-owned Dutch gas giant, on 1 July.

For more policy news, check out this week’s Green Brief and the Health Brief.

Look out for…

• European Council summit on Thursday-Friday.
• Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski in Brazil for the Global Agribusiness Festival.
• Commissioner Kadri Simson participates in opening session of 10th Energy Infrastructure Forum in Copenhagen on Thursday.

Views are the author’s

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]