Emmanuel Macron is the first president of the Fifth Republic to have never served in the military, and it shows.
His bellicose declaration on Monday that the West might deploy ground troops to Ukraine has been roundly rejected by France’s allies. No chance, was the retort of Germany, Britain, Poland and others. Russia also warned that such a deployment would be very unwise.
Macron has never recovered the confidence of his armed forces
As a result, Macron has been left looking foolish and inexperienced, accused of war-mongering in order to boost his self-esteem after a bruising few weeks domestically. A dismissive editorial in today’s Le Figaro, the newspaper of choice for France’s military top brass, said of the president: ‘He draped himself in the cloak of a warlord confronting Putin, but he did so without troops or ammunition, in much the same way as he had, in a whim, summoned the anti-Daesh coalition to confront Hamas’.
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