October 5, 2024 - 8:00am
Emmanuel Macron is no stranger to attention-grabbing one-liners. He once famously declared Nato to be “brain-dead”. Now, he has claimed that the European Union is in mortal danger.
Speaking to Bloomberg this week, the French President argued that the “EU could die”, adding: “We are overregulating and underinvesting. In the two to three years to come, if we follow our classical agenda, we will be out of the market.”
This analysis will not be new to the Euro-nerds who have read the 400 pages of Mario Draghi’s blockbuster report on EU competitiveness, or at least skimmed through its mercifully short summary. According to the document, the EU does not invest enough, lacks innovative superpowers, and has been too naive in defending them from international competitors.
Macron cannot be accused of not taking Europe’s future seriously enough, having already warned last year about the continent’s impending demise. When he argues that both the United States and China are violating international trade rules, he can point out dozens of previous speeches in which he has already made that case. What’s more, he has pushed for European reform as far back as his landmark 2017 Sorbonne speech.
But this Bloomberg interview is trying to paper over contradictions in Macronist thinking on Europe and regulation. Macron’s focus on the EU’s “strategic autonomy” also meant strong support for regulatory sovereignty and thus regulation, especially in the tech sector. The French President’s man in Brussels, former Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton, soon became the face of the EU’s regulatory drive, most recently with the European Parliament’s AI Act. And yet these very same regulatory initiatives are directly targeted by Draghi as harming Europe’s innovative landscape.
More importantly, though, Macron’s main problem is that his speeches are reaching a dwindling audience. His kamikaze decision to dissolve parliament has seriously hampered his political capital and forced him to cobble together a fragile minority government led by the centre-right Prime Minister Michel Barnier.
Simultaneously, his incapacity to rein in France’s deficit to anywhere near the 3% GDP target — the government now fears slippage beyond 6% in 2024 — has provoked concern in Brussels. As a former top Eurocrat once said: “France is France”, and as such will likely avoid the fiscal penalties and kowtowing reserved to smaller eurozone countries, but this fiscal debacle is certainly not improving the country’s credibility.
Really, Breton’s brutal ejection from Ursula von der Leyen’s future Commission last month was a brazen confirmation of France’s declining continental clout. Breton was Macron’s pick for the Commission and received the sack from von der Leyen, who back in 2019 was portrayed as the most Macron-friendly head of the Commission that the French President could have hoped for.
In many ways, Europe has become more Macronist. During the pandemic, the €750-billion Covid-19 recovery fund and the introduction of a common debt instrument were hailed as Europe’s “Hamiltonian moment”. European defence spending is now at a post-1989 high. But, even then, it could be argued that Macron has been more a visionary of strategic autonomy than its actual architect. It was not Macron but Vladimir Putin who forced Europeans to confront their energy dependence on Russia, while it was Covid which made clear the dangers of Europe’s reliance on Chinese goods.
While Macronism as a lyrical European one-man show has likely entered its twilight years, the one silver lining is that the new Paris government might be planting seeds for a more durable and profound form of French influence across the continent.
The choice of Benjamin Haddad as Minister for Europe is an especially interesting signal. A well-connected former think-tanker and a committed Macronist, Haddad has long argued that France relied too much on its executive and its diplomatic network to push its messages across Europe. France lacks creativity and coordination in its mobilisation of its various non-governmental forms of influences, including its think tanks, foundations, NGOs, multinationals and parliamentarians.
This new approach certainly lacks the panache of another grandiose Macron speech, but it might just pay higher dividends in the long run. In the meantime, France’s President will continue to try to shape the bloc’s future — and hope he will still have an audience.
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SubscribeThe Emperor has no clothes.
So the problem is over-reliance on the executive and diplomats and the solution is think tanks, foundations, NGOs, multinationals and parliamentarians? Hmmm.
These are the very groups that most vocally demand regulation and spending to serve their special interests. This is even more of the same that actively stifles innovation, hampers, real investment, and has stopped real growth.
Europe’s prospects dramatically worsened in recent years and there is nothing here that will do anything but speed up the decline.
What’s needed is More Europe.
Unfortunately for Macron this is a very deep-seated problem that goes way deeper than the current practices of the EU bureaucracy.
In the French multinational for whom I worked for a time in the ’90s the discussion was never about how the business could become more competitive but always about how the government might be persuaded to tilt the playing field to damage or exclude competition – especially if that competition was Anglo-Saxon in origin.
especially if that competition was Anglo-Saxon in origin.
The point of most EU regulation to begin with.
The EU is dying? Who knew?
It lost a major contributor with Brexit, the other major contributor, Germany, is in dire economic condition and its people are unlikely to want to continue to pony up more money, the smaller states such as Hungary are unhappy in one way or another, and France itself is being effectively ignored.
The EU is dying, but not fast enough…and the saviour is supposed to be more regulations?
The UK is in sh*t order, and likely to get worse under the current version of the Uniparty but at least it got out of the disaster that is the EU.
Personally I’m hoping that Poland and other new members will start to gain more power and clout as Germany and France fade out/spend time on the benches sorting themselves out.
I suspect that the eastern succession states will, once their armed forces and economies surpass those of the UK, France and Germany, (Poland will over take the UK in 5 years on a GDP per capita basis and its army is already twice the size of the UK’s) decide that they no longer need to be part of an over regulated, superannuated club of spavined has-been’s and simply leave.
I’m surprised it will take Poland five years to surpass the UK on GDP per capita. With the present UK Government’s energy policies it may well be sooner.
Of course, Poland is wise to have a larger army. The UK doesn’t need a large army for defence.
Britain has never had a large army (WW1 and WW2 aside), but it did once have a large navy.
They will borrow, spend, regulate, and bureaucratize themselves into oblivion
First of all, what nonsense.
Europe is dependent on imported energy. That is an objective fact that has been true for decades and has nothing to do with Putin. Over decades, farsighted European politicians have laboriously built an infrastructure that delivered cheap and reliable energy to Europe’s industry. In a monumental fit of self-destructive madness, the EU – not Russia – destroyed this link, and in a further monumental act of industrial terrorism, the EU’s nominally closest ally physically destroyed Europe’s energy lifeline.
The EU has not confronted its dependence on imported energy. “Relying” on unreliable, more expensive by multiples energy promised by the US, is not a solution at all.
“Covid” was similar – all rules of science and law were thrown overboard in a fit of hysteria.
At an EU level and a national level, the whole passel of rogues and incompetents needs to be kicked out. Rebuilding will be painful and take time, but for once, there really is no alternative.
Yes, there is no sensible alternative. However that is unlikely to be taken by any of the present crop of politicians.
It’s going to be incredibly difficult for Macron ever to admit that the British saw this coming……..
More circular reasoning from one of the ringleaders of the current self imposedcslow motion catastrophe.
Macron manipulated the election to suppress the voters. Hecrefuses, as do the rest of the so-called major western leaders, to prioritize his citizens over unregulated massive immigration. He supports what is in effect an empire run by bureaucrats. The troubles he sees were caused by himself and his peers.