Emmanuel Macron In 2017, he gave a speech at La Sorborna that went around the world where he expressed his ideas to re-found the EU. He who is one of the European leaders who has given the most importance to the European project is currently going through his government crisis more complex. And the internal chaos already has an echo in his position at the table of the European Council. With the French streets set on fire by the fund and the forms of the pension reform, the tenant of the elysium is leaving a void Brussels which is being progressively filled by the countries of the East.
During the last European summit that the 27 state and government leaders held last week, Macron kept a low profile. He arrived last and did not make statements to the press upon his arrival. He landed in Brussels a few days after overcoming in extremis a motion of censure and accumulated days of massive protests behind him –which continue– for a controversial reform that extends in two and even 64 years to collect a pension. A legislative shift with enormous repercussions that has been executed without counting on the social agents and by force of decree.
Brussels, in its traditional caution of not making any comments on national developments to avoid that its role as neutral arbitrator could be questioned or contaminated, has not ruled on the events, implications or social tension that the second economic power of the Eurozone. Who has done it is him Council of Europe – an institution that does not belong to the EU – and which has denounced police brutality by security forces as “worrying”.
This internal crisis comes at a time when the quintessential EU leadership, Germany, also has internal skirt troubles. The government coalition, the so-called semaphore made up of social democrats, liberals and greens, maintains different positions that have weighed down the ambitions of the European project. The last one has been the opposition of the liberals to the European regulation that prohibits the sale of combustion cars from 2035. Over the weekend, Brussels and Berlin reached an agreement in extremis that gives the German engine room to register vehicles with “CO2 neutral fuels”. In economic integration, berlin continues to be the main obstacle to the consummation of the Banking Union and the start-up of a Deposit Guarantee Fund. And the feeling in many delegations is one of confusion with the swerves of Olaf Schölz.
He decapitation of the Franco-German axis it is leading to a rebalancing of forces in European decision-making. The union of Macron and the former German chancellor Angela Merkel It was key to launching the post-pandemic European Recovery Fund, but the alliance of Paris and Berlin has lost steam and intensity, which has also had a replica in their mutual influence in the community capital.
Especially in everything related to the war of Ukraine. This vacuum is being taken advantage of by the countries of the East. The neighbors of Russia have been and are since the beginning of the Russian invasion those who mark the passage of the European Union in his response to the dispute. Poland, Lithuania or Estonia They are the most hawkish countries and Brussels embraces and endorses their strategy, which involves cornering Vladimir Putin until the great victory of Ukraine. One of the leaders who has taken advantage of these winds to boost her image and strengthen her leadership is the Estonian Kaja Kallas, who recently pointed out that Europe needs more leaders from the East. The one known as “the new european iron lady” He is one of the faces that appear in the pools to replace Jens Stoltenberg to NATO commanders.
More impassive are France and Germany, who are turning from main actors to passive and timid extras. The former has always wanted to maintain diplomatic bridges with Russia. Macron has been the Western leader who has spoken with Putin the most times in the months leading up to the war. For the second, his priority, once the conflict began, was that of a short war. But ultimately both have succumbed to the strategy that has settled in Brussels and is installed in more and faster weapons for Ukraine and more and stronger sanctions against Russia.
In his aforementioned speech at the Sorbonne on September 26, perhaps the most pro-European and remembered of the liberal leader, Macron slipped the ideas of creating a “profound transformation of the EU” that involved promoting a European military intervention force, a European anti-terrorism prosecutor or a super minister of the Eurozone. “The Europe we know is too weak, slow and ineffective,” she said. Seven years later, the war in Ukraine has generated a catalytic change in the EU. In practically all areas: energy, commercial or military. Many analysts believe that the worst war in Europe in recent decades leaves an EU more strong, fast and effective. But the linked crises that the EU has been dragging since 2010, and especially the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, have changed the order of priorities in the EU and those of Macron himself.
To China with von der Leyen
Macron’s obsession has been during his two legislative terms to promote European strategic autonomy. Sometimes the ambition of the baptized as Jupiler for mediating and intervening in international conflicts through
of their own accord has caused discomfort in Brussels. Foreign policy is perhaps the area in which European unity is most exposed. The 27 countries have different sensibilities, pasts, ambitions and interests that are difficult – and often impossible – to reconcile unanimously.
With all this history, Macron will make an official visit to China next April 4. A few days after what the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, does. The difference is that La Moncloa has always wanted to separate this trip from a kind of mediation, highlighting that despite the fact that Spain assumes the Presidency of the Council of the EU on July 1, Sánchez does not arrive in Beijing with the intention of speaking in European name. Macron, for his part, will not go alone. To meet him with Xi Jinping He will be accompanied by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. The leader of the Community Executive does not completely trust and she wants to make sure that the Frenchman does not act as loose verse in any dialogue that takes place with China about the war in Ukraine. Beijing recently presented a peace plan that has been coldly received by West. And this will be one of the key issues to be discussed at a time when Macron is looking abroad for the oxygen he lacks internally.
