42 Europe The Economist December 18th 2021
A bittersweet Noël
W
henemmanuel macronpeers under his Christmas tree
this year, he will find that le Père Noëlhas left him an unusu
ally big, tantalisingly shiny, but awkwardly shaped gift. Call it a
year in a present. For 2022 brings a double challenge. From Janu
ary for six months, France will run the European Union’s rotating
jamboree, the presidency of the Council of the eu. Yet Mr Macron
is also expected to be campaigning for reelection as French presi
dent in April. To run Europe, as the job will doubtless be portrayed
at home, as well as France, sounds like a Macron fantasy come
true. For other Europeans, the president’s gift, like a toy trumpet,
could turn out to be noisy, unpredictable and exhausting.
This is not the first time the rotating presidency coincides with
a French election. In 1995 a frail François Mitterrand did a four
month stint, before handing over to his successor, Jacques Chirac,
for two. Squads of bureaucrats ensure continuity. These days the
rotating eu interministerial presidency is largely procedural.
Much of the stuff to be discussed in 2022—the regulation of big
tech and hate speech online, an externalborder carbon tax, a
minimum wage—has been in the works in Brussels for months.
But Mr Macron is not one to let process hobble his ambition.
There he was beneath the chandeliers at the Elysée Palace on De
cember 9th, setting off an avalanche of ideas under the cryptic
heading “recovery, power, belonging”. Europe, he declared, will fi
nalise a common securitythreat assessment, discuss new rules
on deficits and debt, agree to green clauses for future trade deals,
rework the borderfree Schengen zone, and more. There will be
summits on the ocean, Africa, a new European growth model and
the Western Balkans. The overarching aim, he declared, was to
fashion a Europe “powerful in the world, fully sovereign, free in
its choices and master of its destiny”. Nothing less.
Those who had thought Mr Macron might scale back his grand
vision were bamboozled. Days earlier an official report, led by
Thierry Chopin at the Institut Jacques Delors, had advised “more
humility” and less grandstanding: in its words, “more Robert
Schuman, less Victor Hugo”. Fellow Europeans do not like to feel
bossed about by France. Many suspect it of wrapping national in
terest in an eu flag. But his lofty European ambition helped to pro
pel Mr Macron into the French presidency in 2017, and in office itshaped a landmark speech at the Sorbonne. A return to that zeal al
so marks, unofficially, the start of his reelection campaign.
To see how these two political moments might interact, con
sider a project in the northern industrial town of Douai, which sits
amid flat agricultural plains on the edge of a mining basin.
Mounds of harvested sugar beet lie on the dark earth in surround
ing fields. Terraced twostorey homes are of the distinctive red
brick of the French north. On the town’s fringe, next to a vast boxy
Renault car plant, work will soon begin on a “gigafactory” to build
electricvehicle batteries. With €200m ($225m) in public subsidy,
under the eu’s greendeal rules, and a privatesector investment of
€2bn, the plant could employ over 2,000 workers by 2030.
For Mr Macron, who toured the site six months ago, the giga
factory exemplifies his Sorbonne vision of “European sovereign
ty” or “strategic autonomy”: the reinforcement of the eu’s ability
to build, decide and defend itself more. Back then Mr Macron was
judged a dreamer, protectionist, or worse. But the European con
versation has shifted. Even Germany’s new coalition government,
under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, embraces “strategic sovereignty”, a
term that conveniently merges two of Mr Macron’s own. Douai, so
to speak, is where the tyres of the Macron Eurovision hit the road.
Locally, the factory is welcomed as a means of “anchoring”
Douai and showcasing its industrial culture, says Frédéric Ché
reau, the Socialist mayor. Jobs are much needed. There is talk of an
“electric valley”. Yet the plant also exposes two problems for Mr
Macron. First, the investor, Envision aesc, is SinoJapanese. Al
though batteries will be Frenchbuilt, this hints at the limits to
European selfsufficiency. Second, voters may not thank the cen
trist Mr Macron for it. In 2017 Douai backed him in the second
round, but in the first preferred the populistnationalist Marine Le
Pen and the hardleft JeanLuc Mélenchon. The rust belt is not Mr
Macron’s natural territory, however many new factories have
emerged on his watch. The eu, says Douai’s mayor, is seen as a
“necessary evil”, not a force that stirs the mind or warms the heart.O come, o come, Emmanuel
Indeed, Europe as a campaign theme has just got trickier for Mr
Macron. Polls had suggested that his chief opponent would be Ms
Le Pen. He champions the eu; she derides it; nobody is confused.
Yet the election of Valérie Pécresse, a proEuropean exbudget
minister, as the centreright Republicans’ nominee blurs that line.
Polls give her a good chance of facing Mr Macron in the runoff;
one says she could beat him. Europe does not divide the pair. Mr
Macron will try, instead, to use the eu to expose the Republicans’
internal divisions over it, which helped him in 2017 to steal so ma
ny of them, and which Mrs Pécresse may struggle to disguise. But
it will be harder.
The president’s present carries other risks. As Mr Macron criss
crosses France, and home news channels label him “le président de
l’Europe”, rival candidates will denounce unfair electioneering. As
he pushes pet projects, such as the reform of eu fiscal rules, other
countries will struggle to consider France an honest broker, not
least because of its own rulebusting budgets. Smaller countries
are anyway wary. They recall that the last big country in charge,
Germany, pushed through a controversial investment pact with
China in the closing days of 2020, to others’ irritation.
Mr Macron’s Christmas present may yet turn out to be just what
he asked for. Success in Europe could help him securevictory in
France. But neither is by any means guaranteed. Thepresident
could end up wishing that he had simply asked for socks.nCharlemagne
The French president’s tricky Christmas present