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OPINION: Macron's Churchillian rhetoric provides a vital clue to events in France

John Lichfield
John Lichfield - [email protected]
OPINION: Macron's Churchillian rhetoric provides a vital clue to events in France
French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech in Paris after his summer break. Photo by MOHAMMED BADRA / POOL / AFP

Once may be a freak or a curiosity - three times in five days is a strategy, writes John Lichfield after Emmanuel Macron's trio of speeches warning of tough times ahead for France and the West.

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President Emmanuel Macron has started France’s new electoral season with a trio of apocalyptic speeches in which he warned that France, the European Union and the West are entering a time of great danger and profound change.

On Wednesday he arranged, atypically, for the 24-hour TV news channels to broadcast live his introductory remarks to the first cabinet meeting after the government’s short summer break.

“We are living through a time of radical shift,” Macron said. (In French he used the word ‘bascule’ which means tipping point.)

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“Our times may seem to be a succession of great crises. Some people might see our fate as being a perpetual management of crises. In my opinion, what we are going though is more like a great tipping point or upheaval.”

He went on to warn of the new strength of autocratic and illiberal governments; the end of an age of “carefree abundance”; and permanent shortages of water and raw materials.

Last Friday President Macron had warned French people that they faced a hard winter, partly because of the Ukraine war. He appealed to them to be ready to pay “the price of liberty”, rather than listen to the “simplistic” rhetoric of hard-left and far-right about the allegedly self-destructive impact of sanctions on Moscow.

He made similar remarks in a recorded video speech to a conference in Ukraine on Tuesday.

At one level, this is Macron at his best.

Unlike many politicians, he is willing - even eager - to set aside the tyranny of headlines and try to take the long view of events. He is sometimes accused of having the instincts of a think-tank president, rather than a President of the Republic.

Compare his comments, nonetheless, with the banalities and inanities of the campaign in Britain to elect a new Conservative Party leader (and incidentally a new Prime Minister). Macron probably had Britain in mind when he went on to urge his ministers to "resist the temptations of demagogy".

“It’s easy to promise everything and anything…in a complex world where fear thrives,” he said.

Macron is, however, head of state, not head of a think-tank. His volley of apocalyptic speeches was, I believe, more than Macronsplaining. It was part of a political strategy. Macron is trying to define the dangers of the next six months on his own terms before the next six month defines, and destroys, him.

Street marches and strikes are already planned by the Left and by trades unions next month to demand higher wages and protest against Macron’s plans for pension and unemployment pay reform. The hard left La France Insoumise and Far Right Rassemblement National are starting to complain more loudly  against EU sanctions on Moscow.

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A severing of Russian gas supplies would send the cost of energy in Europe into the stratosphere this winter. The government cannot indefinitely borrow billions to shield French consumers from the pain,

After poor results in the June parliamentary elections, Macron and his Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne have lost their absolute majority of seats in the National Assembly. Their success in pushing through a €44 billion package of anti-inflation measures early this month was impressive but also misleading.

Macron will find it much harder - and maybe impossible - to assemble majorities for his pension or employment reforms or  painful responses to the multi-layered crises which threaten this winter.

 Macron has had a strange year. He was hyper-active in his responses to the Covid and Ukraine crises but strangely passive during the parliamentary elections.

He has been accused by some of his own allies - as recently as last week in a large, well-researched article in Le Monde - of drifting through the summer without a clear plan for his second five years in the Elysée Palace.  

The flurry of blood, sweat and tears speeches is, I believe, his response to those criticisms. Earlier this month the President allowed himself to be photographed riding a fuel-guzzling jet ski off the French Mediterranean coast. Presumably at that point, he had not yet decided to warn the French people that the “age of carefree abundance” is over.

There is much in Macron’s recent rhetoric which make sense. But it is also intended, I believe, to provide him and his government with an over-arching strategy for the next six to ten months.

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His comments have already drawn an angry response from trades unions and the Left. “What abundance”?” they ask. Many poorer French people are already suffering from the steep rise in prices (despite the expensive government efforts which have kept inflation to around 6.1 percent, compared to over 10 percent in the UK). Macron’s warnings are, they claim, just a cover for imposing new “sacrifices” on the poor.

The President’s strategy is somewhat subtler than that. Rather than seeming to submit to a procession of crises this winter, he wants to give French people a patriotic road-map. We are entering brutal times but with unity and clarity of purpose we can survive with our value, and some of our prosperity, intact.

Is that also a road-map for calling an early parliamentary election next year? Now there is a question…

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Anonymous 2022/08/25 16:57
V helpful commentary. The next 6-12 months will not be easy, here’s hoping that together with prime minister Borne he can keep us on track regardless of strong challenges from extremes of left an right, and that young people in particular are supported in their desired futures. Please write more about them and their future; the future of France depends on them.

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