It was the sobriety of Emmanuel Macron’s TV address yesterday that first struck a different tone. No Rococo gilt mouldings. No boldly-coloured abstract art next to damask hangings. Nothing that screamed: “I’m talking to you from the Elysée Palace”. No star TV interviewer, blow-dry at the ready, fawningly lobbing soft questions to Le Président.
White background, dark tie, few gestures: taking up the mantle of a war president, Emmanuel Macron was certainly conscious of seizing his last opportunity to leave a strong historical legacy. This has come after months of parliamentary gridlock, placeholder PMs and plummeting poll numbers – but in his constitutional role of military and diplomatic leader, he projected the gravitas, vision and sincerity that has long eluded him.
In unusually blunt terms, Macron called out “the Russian threat”. He said that: “President Putin’s Russia has assassinated opponents inside our own countries, manipulated elections in Romania and Moldova; cyberattacked our hospitals to cripple their operations, spreading countless lies on social media”.
The Russians, Macron added, are also “currently spending over 40 per cent of [their] budget re-arming. They plan to increase their military by 300,000 additional soldiers, 3,000 tanks, 300 fighter and bomber jets. Who could believe they mean to stop at Ukraine?”
The same day, after Donald Trump enacted his promise to suspend Ukrainian access to US intelligence, France formally offered Ukraine its own intelligence production.
The 8th president of the Fifth Republic has also committed France’s independent nuclear force to extend its protective umbrella over her European allies. If that option is taken up it will mean the end of Charles de Gaulle’s exclusively French vision for our nuclear power. In the French psyche, it’s comparable to Britain getting rid of the Monarchy.
Having laid out the dire prospect of war-war, Macron is still pushing jaw-jaw. Right after his broadcast, he had dinner with Hungary’s fractious PM Viktor Orbán, the strong champion of Donald Trump: the topic of this one-on-one was specifically to talk about the war in Ukraine. (The two have always had good relations.) A Washington visit, together with Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelensky, has also been mooted for next week.
All of this has proved popular with the French public. A Toluna/Harris Interactive Institute snap poll published yesterday showed that 52 per cent of viewers found his TV address “convincing”, 68 per cent favour raising France’s military budget and 61 per cent approve extending French nuclear deterrence to the EU27. 58 per cent also support arms delivery to Ukraine and would “understand” reducing some of the State’s expenditure, including some social benefits, to make this possible.
It’s not a honeymoon yet, but Emmanuel Macron can now enjoy more political breathing space than he has known in almost a year. His more rabid opponents, on the hard-Right and the hard-Left, find themselves wrong-footed. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella of the National Rally were slow in expressing support for Zelensky (they eventually did in the belief that there are votes in it for them); Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed still sticks by its pro-Russia stance. From just hoping to retain relevance, the French president has scored a win.
It was the sobriety of Emmanuel Macron’s TV address yesterday that first struck a different tone. No Rococo gilt mouldings. No boldly-coloured abstract art next to damask hangings. Nothing that screamed: “I’m talking to you from the Elysée Palace”. No star TV interviewer, blow-dry at the ready, fawningly lobbing soft questions to Le Président.
White background, dark tie, few gestures: taking up the mantle of a war president, Emmanuel Macron was certainly conscious of seizing his last opportunity to leave a strong historical legacy. This has come after months of parliamentary gridlock, placeholder PMs and plummeting poll numbers – but in his constitutional role of military and diplomatic leader, he projected the gravitas, vision and sincerity that has long eluded him.
In unusually blunt terms, Macron called out “the Russian threat”. He said that: “President Putin’s Russia has assassinated opponents inside our own countries, manipulated elections in Romania and Moldova; cyberattacked our hospitals to cripple their operations, spreading countless lies on social media”.
The Russians, Macron added, are also “currently spending over 40 per cent of [their] budget re-arming. They plan to increase their military by 300,000 additional soldiers, 3,000 tanks, 300 fighter and bomber jets. Who could believe they mean to stop at Ukraine?”
The same day, after Donald Trump enacted his promise to suspend Ukrainian access to US intelligence, France formally offered Ukraine its own intelligence production.
The 8th president of the Fifth Republic has also committed France’s independent nuclear force to extend its protective umbrella over her European allies. If that option is taken up it will mean the end of Charles de Gaulle’s exclusively French vision for our nuclear power. In the French psyche, it’s comparable to Britain getting rid of the Monarchy.
Having laid out the dire prospect of war-war, Macron is still pushing jaw-jaw. Right after his broadcast, he had dinner with Hungary’s fractious PM Viktor Orbán, the strong champion of Donald Trump: the topic of this one-on-one was specifically to talk about the war in Ukraine. (The two have always had good relations.) A Washington visit, together with Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelensky, has also been mooted for next week.
All of this has proved popular with the French public. A Toluna/Harris Interactive Institute snap poll published yesterday showed that 52 per cent of viewers found his TV address “convincing”, 68 per cent favour raising France’s military budget and 61 per cent approve extending French nuclear deterrence to the EU27. 58 per cent also support arms delivery to Ukraine and would “understand” reducing some of the State’s expenditure, including some social benefits, to make this possible.
It’s not a honeymoon yet, but Emmanuel Macron can now enjoy more political breathing space than he has known in almost a year. His more rabid opponents, on the hard-Right and the hard-Left, find themselves wrong-footed. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella of the National Rally were slow in expressing support for Zelensky (they eventually did in the belief that there are votes in it for them); Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed still sticks by its pro-Russia stance. From just hoping to retain relevance, the French president has scored a win.