Macron carves out a place in history—far from France
If French voters won’t let him work his will on their nation, they can’t keep him from placing his stamp on the rest of the world.
You might perhaps be wondering why French President Emmanuel Macron held a two-day state visit last week with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyane, president of the United Arab Emirates, followed by a “working lunch” at the Élysée Palace on Wednesday with Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, and a “conversation” on July 5 before either of these Arab leaders hit the Élysée with Israeli Prime Minister Yaïr Lapid—Lapid’s first visit abroad since taking over that politically troubled nation and even before he would welcome Biden to Israel on July 13. Then the newly re-elected French president followed that up with a lunch for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi on Friday. And in between, he found a moment to pick up the telephone for a hard-nosed chat with his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi.
Finally, tomorrow Macron is embarking on a three-nation tour of western Africa, back to colonial days a fixation of French interests but which has become increasingly toxic in recent months. Cameroon will be followed by Benin with a windup in Guinea-Bissau for the Macron entourage. Food supply in the wake of disruptions of grain exports from Ukraine will be at the top of the agenda, though security—and France's role in suppressing the spread of Islamic insurgencies—will be a critical focus. And all this while Macron will be hoping to shed a whole lot of conventional wisdom that has burdened so many French presidents in their dealings with Africa.
Macron has quickly come to appreciate one fact of life for a French president. If his own voters last month chose not to give him an inalienable majority in the Assemblée Nationale, the one place he can still have a real, perhaps historic impact is abroad. The whole rest of the world is his oyster. Just not France itself particularly.
That’s a profound difference from Joe Biden. American voters still hold Biden responsible for anything that goes bad both at home and abroad. Like Macron, there’s not much Biden can do about most things at home in the absence of a solid majority in both houses of Congress. That doesn’t mean Biden won’t get blamed for how badly things are stacking up. But in France, there’s a broad realization that the entire governmental system is foutu—a fairly elegant way of saying it’s fucked.
That all happened in the two round elections for the new parliament last month which left Macron’s Renaissance party with a plurality in the National Assembly in contrast to the absolute majority it enjoyed during his first five-year term. Since none of the opposition parties managed an outright majority, Macron is not condemned to endure a “cohabitation” as earlier presidents have endured from time to time. A true cohabitation takes place when an opposition party obtains an absolute majority in parliament, allowing a prime minister and government to be installed and controlled by the opposition. In Macron's case, he is able to appoint a government headed by his designated prime minister, Elizabeth Borne. But she has little power to hammer through any substantial initiatives or most elements of the sweeping programs Macron had hoped might mark his second and final five years in office.
Fortunately, the constitution of the Fifth Republic does allow him virtually unfettered ability to work his magic in foreign affairs—which Macron now seems fully intent on capitalizing. So just what might be possible here for France's president?
First, he would love to play peacemaker in Ukraine. He is certainly aware of the role one of his predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy, played in bringing to a conclusion Russia’s adventure in another post-Soviet state—Georgia. But Macron’s efforts, involving a score of phone calls with Vladimir Putin, even an in-person Kremlin visit, did not succeed in heading off the invasion of Ukraine. Moreover, he no longer has the standing of President of the Council of Europe, having ceded that rotating post for the next six months to the prime minister of the Czech Republic.
Still, Macron has not given up on this and remains in close touch especially with his German counterpart, Chancellor Olaf Scholz. With the resignation last week of Mario Draghi as prime minister of Italy, one stable European government supporting a democratic Ukraine has suddenly been erased. And it has no doubt hardly been lost on Vladimir Putin that Macron has been deeply wounded domestically by the results of last month's parliamentary elections. At the same time, Scholz has never been dealt a strong hand as the head of a weak coalition in Germany that had long basked under the 16-year reign of his all but unchallenged predecessor Angela Merkel.
None of this seems to have fazed Macron, who last month visited Ukraine with both his fellow western leaders. But lately, Macron has set about putting his own stamp on a host of initiatives designed to burnish his image abroad and potentially his historical standing.
France has taken a leadership role in climate change since Prime Minister Laurent Fabius convened the COP-21 conference at Le Bourget field outside Paris in 2015 and by his personal force of will brought it to an unheralded but apparently successful conclusion. Al-Sissi is about to convene COP-27 at Sharm El-Sheikh in November, while Sheikh Mohamed will host COP-28 next year at the UAE's Dubai Expo City—both high on the agenda of their respective talks with Macron this month in Paris.
With vast stretches of France and other parts of Europe and North America engulfed in flames spawned by a record-setting heatwave, such negotiations have never seemed more urgent, yet somehow more out of reach. Macron has attempted to realign France's agenda by moving toward an expanding reliance on nuclear generation—long a foundation of France's production of electricity—along with vast new projects for offshore wind farms and solar arrays. Such a model is suddenly of immediate and growing urgency in Germany and broad stretches of Europe now facing the prospects of restricted supplies of natural gas from Russia to power their factories and heat their homes in the winter ahead.
And then there’s Iran and its nuclear ambitions. As one of the six nations party to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and with the United States still at least nominally withdrawn from the pact in the wake of Donald Trump's ill-considered action, Macron has long seen himself as a potential lynchpin in moving toward some successful completion the talks that have languished in Vienna for months. So, when Yaïr Lapid came to lunch at the Élysée, Macron was quite direct with the Israeli leader:
"I would like to remind you once again of our desire to conclude the negotiations on a return to respect for the JCPOA as soon as possible. We agree with Israel that this agreement will not be enough to contain Iran's destabilizing activities, but I remain more convinced than ever that an Iran that would be on the threshold of nuclear (power) could carry out its activities in an even more dangerous way. We must therefore defend this agreement."
Still, Lapid was hardly reluctant to point out that European leaders have become even tougher on Iran than Washington—a return in some respects to the hardline attitude taken by Fabius at the time the JCPOA was first under negotiation. At the time Fabius demanded greater controls on Iran's Arak heavy-water reactor as means of slowing the country's progress toward development of a nuclear weapon. Now, all but unchecked since the American withdrawal from the pact, Iran is little more than weeks away from the ability to develop such a weapon. Both Lapid, a relative moderate in Israeli political terms, and Macron agree as Lapid observed, that "the current situation cannot continue as it is. It will lead to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, which would threaten world peace."
At the same time, with Lapid, al-Sissi, and Sheikh Mohammed, not to mention Palestinian leader Abbas, all parading through Macron’s dining room successively, it was hardly surprising that in a background briefing a senior Élysée official pointed out that the French leader might not mind playing Arab-Israeli peacemaker. "France really supports normalization between the Emirates and Israel and the other countries concerned," the official said, referring specifically to Macron's talks with the sheikh, continuing that France "happens to have great connections with the Emirates, excellent relations with Israel. So, in any case, anything that can contribute to developing, deepening this dynamic, the President not only is ready, but actually is prepared to contribute to, encourage it."
Of course, in all of these meetings, there is the basso continuo—the harmonic underpinnings—of business. France is one of the largest arms suppliers to the Middle East. This was the first overseas visit by Sheikh Mohammed since taking office in May following the death of his half-brother, and both parties were eager to sign contracts. So, after lunch, a deal was cemented between France's Total Energies and the UAE's state oil company ADNOC to secure petroleum supplies as an alternative to Russian sources. The UAE was already a customer for the largest-ever French weapons contract—$18 billion worth of 80 Rafale fighter jets from Dassault Aviation and 12 Airbus combat helicopters—that Macron concluded during his own visit to the UAE last December.
Egypt was also a major customer of Rafales on the wake of the contract Macron concluded with Al-Sisi last year for 30 Rafales, the Egyptian ruler in return receiving France's highest honor—the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor—which horrified human rights activists. After their lunch last week, an Élysée official observed that Macron had "addressed the issue of human rights." Egypt still holds some 60,000 political prisoners in its jails.
Finally, Macron has decided to reassert France’s interest in Africa. In April, he announced France was pulling its entire military force out of Mali. Some 5,000 French troops had been fighting a host of insurgent groups, especially al-Qaeda and the Islamic State who'd fled to the Sahel from vast stretches of the Middle East where they'd faced sharp setbacks. Lately, French forces had been seen as powerless to halt their advance in Mali while at the same time some 55 French troops have been killed there. When Mali's government called in the Russian paramilitary organization Wagner Group, Macron called it quits.
But with thousands of French citizens living across the Sahel and deep economic interests, France is not prepared abandon the region. Macron's visit to Benin, Cameroon, and Guinea-Bissau is clearly intended as a gesture to demonstrate France's continued interest in engaging in Africa and assuring its security. Benin, in particular, has been subject to a multiplicity of terrorist attacks. An Élysée official has pointed to Benin's call for French air support, intelligence, and equipment as essential to halting this pattern. No other country is as engaged at the moment in West Africa. Macron clearly wants to maintain France's leading role.
The reality is that there are few leaders in any position to challenge a Macron bid for leadership of Europe. So if, quietly and inexorably, he can build a reputation beyond his borders as conciliator, peacemaker, merchant, even visionary, then perhaps that will trump (with a small ‘t’) any obstacles his manifold opponents across the French political spectrum can throw into his path at home.
With deepest thanks to Damien Glez, a Cartooning for Peace artist based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, for his remarkable illustrations.
"And then there’s Iran and its nuclear ambitions. As one of the six nations party to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and with the United States still at least nominally withdrawn from the pact in the wake of Donald Trump's ill-considered action," Sorry, David, you were sounding intelligent until this insanely stupid comment. Kerry and Obama signed this asinine non-treaty with the evil mullahs in Iran. One of Trump's smartest achievements was withdrawing from this damaging madness. Not only did Obama and Kerry negotiate with evildoing murderers, they sent them pallets of billions of dollars in cash that was used for more murder and mayhem.