Emmanuel Macron is Donald Trump in reverse

Is Emmanuel Macron the oddest leader in the EU? When he became President of France last year, he made a speech at Versailles to both houses of parliament calling for a renewal of ‘the spirit of conquest’. This year, commemorating the centenary of the Armistice, he seemed more inclined to invent a project for perpetual peace, like some 18th-century rationalist. In recent days, he has demanded our fish, decided that the gilets jaunes, who are rioting about his astonishing diesel price rises to save the planet, are really a ‘brown plague’, and welcomed a report which wishes to empty France’s museums of any treasures which originated in Africa, Oceania and anywhere else that can claim victim status, and return them thither. M. Macron is the anti-populists’ populist — over-reactive, shallow, denunciatory, hogging the limelight, instinctively hostile to the ordinary citizen. He is a sort of Donald Trump in reverse — pint-sized, Gallic, politically correct and énarque — but equally vain.