Emmanuel Macron opened the campaign for the European elections in June this Thursday with a dramatic warning: “Our Europe is mortal today. You can die. And it depends on our decisions.” In a speech at Sorbonne University, the French president called for “building a credible defense of the European continent.” He asked to change the economic model “to avoid being left behind” in the global race. And he proposed a common story for Europeans, an identity of their own, “a democratic, humanist and liberal model that is questioned today.” With these initiatives, he aims to prevent the EU from succumbing to the threat of Russia or the competition between the United States and China.
To prevent Europe from being relegated, according to the president, the EU must project itself as a power, which requires progress in military cooperation and industrial investments, and protection of borders. He must find the formula to maintain his social model and his environmental ambitions in the face of competitors that do not respect the same standards and, at the same time, not lose, as is happening, the train of growth. Europe, he said, is surrounded “by powers on its borders and sometimes within it,” he added, alluding to the rise of nationalist and populist parties, which may play a key role in the next European Parliament.
“It is today that the question of peace and war on our continent and our ability to ensure or not ensure our security is at stake,” he declared in an almost two-hour speech that was reminiscent of the State of the Union speeches in its exhaustiveness. of American presidents. “The great transformations are at stake, that of the digital transition, that of artificial intelligence, as well as that of the environment and decarbonization. At stake is the attack against liberal democracies, against our values.”
There was patriotism – European patriotism, and French through European – in Macron’s words. Just as his predecessor, General Charles de Gaulle, had “a certain idea of France,” he has “a certain idea of Europe.” Macron appropriates terms associated with Eurosceptics and nationalists and Europeanizes them. Sovereignty is one. Another is the Brexit slogan: take back control, regain control: “We must be able to regain control of our lives, of our destiny…”. The difference is that the subject take back control and gives security to citizens in an uncertain time and world is not the State or the nation: it is the European Union.
The speech was the president’s second at the Sorbonne on the EU. The first, in 2017, marked the European debate in the following years and introduced the concept of “European sovereignty”. Meanwhile, a pandemic has passed, and war has returned to the continent. He is no longer the leader newly come to power with the blue and starry flag of Europe. Power wears out, the Franco-German engine has been seized for years, France has made economic reforms, but has proven incapable of controlling the deficit and the debt, and its president no longer finds it so easy to make himself heard in a club whose center of gravity, After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it moves eastward.
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This Thursday, in the amphitheater of the old Parisian university, and under the severe gaze of the statues of Descartes, Pascal, Richelieu, there were dozens of empty seats, which blurred the ambition of the speech. But Europe is still he macronist theme, where he feels most comfortable and where he maintains an influence that continues to diminish in his country. The message was no less resounding than seven years ago. Once the concept of “European sovereignty” is widely accepted, he urges us to accept that Europe will be a power “that is respected and guarantees its security,” a Europe “with the capacity to show that it is never a vassal of the United States of America.” . And understand that “it is not possible to be a power without a solid economic base.”
Strategic intimacy
Macron defended greater “strategic intimacy” between the partners that would allow them to “defend themselves”, without the US. He advocated the creation of an EU military academy and giving preference to the purchase of European military material to reduce dependence on other producers. He assured that the French atomic bomb – France is the only EU country that has it – is, at a time when Donald Trump threatens to withdraw the US from Europe and leave it without the umbrella of the superpower, “an unavoidable element.” of the defense of the European continent.”
In economic matters, he proposed an “investment shock” and doubling the EU’s capacity for financial action. Also integrate growth and decarbonization – and not just inflation control – into the objectives of monetary policy. And to become a world leader in five sectors by 2030: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, space, biotechnologies and new energies, including nuclear energy. Another proposal, of a social nature: set the digital age of majority – the age at which minors can access the digital space without parental permission – at 15 years. “Would anyone send their children to the jungle at 5, 10, 12 years old?” he asked himself. “No one with common sense.”
In addition to proposing a catalog of measures, and claiming his role in the progress of recent years – with the pandemic or Russia – the French president had another idea: relaunch the European campaign of his party and its candidate, Valérie Hayer, that the polls place him at 10 points or more behind the far-right candidate, Jordan Bardella, and that he is bordering on catastrophe if this advantage continues to widen. The Macronists compete not only with the eurosceptic and nationalist Bardella, but also, on the left, with the thriving Raphaël Glucksmann, a Macron-style pro-European who heads the socialist list. The president’s speech was programmatic. And electoral.
Beyond the concrete proposals, which will fuel the debate on the priorities of Parliament and the Commission that emerge from the next elections, Macron argued that a “cultural battle” is being waged in the EU over its identity, its soul. “Our Europe does not love itself,” he lamented. Europe, he repeated, paraphrasing the poet Paul Valéry, “can die”, but the paradox – he completed by quoting another classic, the Italian Antonio Gramsci – is that “European ideas have won the Gramscian combat: none of the nationalisms throughout Europe dare to say that he is going to leave the euro or Europe.” “Massive strategic decisions must be made,” he urged, “and responded to through power, prosperity and humanism.”