Emmanuel Macron spoke to his people last night in a television address and told them that the future of Ukraine cannot be decided by America and Russia alone.
It can, and it probably will, after Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky signalled his intention to sign Donald Trump’s minerals deal, the first step in the peace plan drawn up by the USA. One of the curiosities of Macron’s speech was that he spent most of it warning about war, as America, Russia and Ukraine talk about peace. Putin’s bellicosity ‘knows no borders’, declared the French president, adding: ‘Who can believe today that Russia would stop at Ukraine?’.
The martial tone of Macron’s address provoked accusations of war-mongering from the French left and right
The martial tone of Macron’s address provoked accusations of war-mongering from the French left and right. Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise claimed the president’s intention was to ‘scare us in order to impose a new round of social sacrifices on the people’
Laurent Jacobelli, an MP in Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, took a similar line, charging the president with ‘playing on fears and using the war in Ukraine to accelerate his federalist agenda’.
A united Europe was at the heart of Macron’s address. ‘Europe has the economic strength, the power and the talent to live up to this era and to compare ourselves to the United States of America,’ he said. ‘We have the means. So we must act united as Europeans and be determined to protect ourselves.’
To that end, the president said that in light of a proposal by Friedrich Merz, the new Chancellor of Germany, he has ‘decided to open the strategic debate on the protection of our allies on the European continent through our (nuclear) deterrence’.
Macron opened his address by stating that the West is ‘entering a new era’, and once-trusted allies are no longer quite so trustworthy. He described Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on European goods as ‘incomprehensible’ and warned of retaliation. In one of the most significant passages of his address he took a veiled swipe at JD Vance, who outraged the European elite last month when he spoke at the Munich Security Defence.
The American vice-president suggested that Europe’s greatest danger wasn’t Russia but rather ‘the threat from within’: an elite that fears its people and is slowly stifling freedom of expression in order to keep them in check.
Europe, proclaimed Macron, defended its democracy with ‘a belief in truth, in freely seeking respect within our societies, a freedom of expression which is not just opening up avenues for hate speech’.
This was the rallying cry of Progressist Europe against Trump’s America. ‘Our country will be woke no longer,’ he had declared to Congress on Tuesday. Macron is determined that Europe will remain ‘woke’. He views the cultural revolution underway in the USA as a danger, what he described in January as a ‘new international reactionary movement’.
This ideological divergence was analysed this week by one of France’s most distinguished geopoliticians, François Martin, whose most recent book is ‘The Time of Fractures’. Martin echoed Macron’s view that a new era had dawned. ‘We’ve passed from a geopolitical conflict to one that is geocultural’, he explained. Trump’s America upholds the same social conservatism as Russia, Africa, Asia and the Middle East with the nuclear family paramount. Europe said Martin, is now the cradle of Progressivism. ‘These two conceptions are utterly incompatible’.
There are of course divergences within Europe. Eastern Europe is more attuned to Trump’s world view than Western Europe, although Italian PM Giorgia Meloni is an outlier. There are deep ideological fractures within some western European countries. In last month’s German election, the former East Germany voted overwhelmingly for the Alternative für Deutschland, which is a supporter of Trump’s America.
In France, this split manifested itself in a recent poll. Should France send troops to Ukraine? Overall, 65 per cent of respondents replied in the negative. Those most enthusiastic about deploying soldiers were Macron voters (50 per cent) and left-wing voters (47 per cent). Most opposed to the idea were people who identified as centre-right (30 per cent) and right wing (13 per cent).
The EU’s 27 leaders meet in Brussels today in an emergency summit. They will reaffirm their support for Ukraine and also discuss European defence. Earlier this week, Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President, unveiled an €800 billion (£670 billion) plan to ‘re-arm Europe’.
If Europe and America are to remain allies it is not just militarily where the Old Continent needs to rearm. An ideological rearmament is also required, as some in France have been saying for years. But that won’t happen under Emmanuel Macron, the most progressive of presidents. He and Trump have nothing in common and nor, increasingly, do America and Europe.