The News
French President Emmanuel Macron has a bleak warning: Europe faces a panoply of risks that could spell its doom, he said in an interview with The Economist, part of a wider effort to set out his vision for a refashioned European Union ahead of June’s European Parliament elections.
The challenges he sees are many. Europe needs to stand up to Russia and accept that the US might not always have its back, Macron said. He predicts that Europe is about to fall behind in critical tech sectors and could be overtaken by an ever-stronger China. And on the home front, he’s worried that the region’s leaders are ready to resign themselves to defeat at the hands of domestic nationalists.
“Europe is mortal,” Macron told the newspaper. “It can die.”
Macron’s plan is for Europe to become less militarily dependent on the US, and he won’t rule out sending troops to Ukraine. He wants European industry to catch up to the US and China and would “double research spending, deregulate industry, free up capital markets and sharpen Europeans’ appetite for risk,” The Economist explained.
SIGNALS
Macron might not have the popularity to convince the public
Macron is not popular at home; at the end of last year, 68% of France disapproved of his leadership. That could make it even more difficult to get the public to heed his warnings, which some view as transparent electioneering. “Like other gloomy visionaries, he faces the risk that his message is ignored,” The Economist wrote.
His unpopularity could also pave the way for Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally party to rise to power, a fellow at the European Policy Centre warned, one of the fears the French president identified. According to Bloomberg: “A far-right presidency would be the ultimate failure for Macron.”
Warnings come as US creeps toward isolationism
Macron’s warning over Russia speaks to larger European concerns about the US Republican Party’s isolationist streak, particularly as the once-hawkish party balks at sending more money to Ukraine. A proposed cash infusion for the embattled country met with months of GOP pushback before the Senate finally passed the funding package last week, ramping up anxieties about how Europe could protect Ukraine if the US backed away completely.
Spurred by those fears, Germany, Estonia, Denmark, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic signed a letter in February that called for a major scale-up of European military aid to Ukraine. “Europe is stepping up to defend Ukraine, but it also knows that it needs to step up to defend itself more broadly,” a political analyst at the European University Institute told NPR.
Strained Franco-German ties a threat to Macron’s vision for Europe
Macron’s vision to reinvent Europe as a geopolitical and military power will depend largely on relationships — particularly that of Paris with Berlin. But “his weakness has often been the building of alliances, above all at a time when the Franco-German tie is so strained,” The Economist wrote. That frayed bond represents a ”break in trust″ between two countries fighting for “different visions of the EU’s future,” Reuters said.
As Macron himself seemed to point out, it’s a bad time for infighting in Europe. “A strong working relationship between Macron and [German Chancellor Olaf Scholz] is crucial to not just the future of Ukraine but also greater Europe,” The Telegraph wrote.