Is Emmanuel Macron’s EU project about to meet its Waterloo?

Emmanuel Macron, the once golden boy of European politics, could be about to suffer his first electoral humiliation. A black mood has settled over the president. Ministers have been ordered to campaign and tweet as if their jobs depend on it. Which they might. The president himself, dressed habitually like a funeral director, is on his normal hyper-manic schedule. But he fails to inspire and his electoral traction is barely visible.

The spectre haunting the Elysée is that in less than three weeks, Macron’s Napoleonic European project, the so-called EU Renaissance, intended to federalise diplomacy, fiscality and defence, will meet its Waterloo.

The president’s luck seems exhausted. Where once nothing could go wrong, now nothing goes right. He has no political instincts. His narcissism has become a gigantic turnoff. A majority of the French want nothing to do with his modernist ideas for rebuilding ravaged Notre-Dame (as a monument to himself?), but just want it restored.