France has been in a state of organised uprising this week, with 300,000 motorists taking to the streets and autoroutes to protest against rising fuel taxes. One protester has died, more than 400 have been injured and even more disruption is on the way.
Watching Emmanuel Macron, you wouldn’t know it. He travelled to Berlin to commemorate Germany’s war dead, launching for the second time in a fortnight into his proposal for a single European army, and saying it was Europe’s duty to prevent the world ‘slipping into global chaos’ — apparently unable to recognise the chaotic scenes he had left behind.
It is not out of character for France’s young President, who, since being elected with lukewarm support last year, has developed an aloofness with which he would never survive in Britain’s less forgiving democracy. Whether launching coded attacks on Donald Trump or floating proposals for ever-greater European integration, he has tried to establish himself as the pre-eminent international statesman of his time, putting forward blueprints for Europe while failing to command the support of his own people for his modest economic reforms.
How odd it seems for Macron to speak of Trump as some strange aberration of western democracy when he has far lower approval ratings than the US President: just one in four French voters back his record. Were Macron to be polled on his pan-European approval rating, he would not fare much better. At a time of widespread disenchantment with the EU and its undemocratic ways, Macron has sought to make a virtue out of being tin-eared, attempting to hold Europe up as a model for the world to emulate.
The nasty underbelly of European politics is there for all to see in the rise of far-right movements across the Continent.
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