The EU’s new emperor: what would Macron’s second term look like?

Emmanuel Macron, with eagle eyes, is staring at Europe like stout Cortez. Elected president of France almost five years ago aged just 39, he dreams beyond the renewal of his lease on the Élysée Palace in the April election. Now Angela Merkel has left the world stage, Macron’s ambition is to replace her as Europe’s de facto leader and to father a European federation, a United States of Europe, with France and himself at its centre.

On New Year’s Day, France assumed the rotating six-month presidency of the European Council, the supreme institution of the European Union, an organisation some might think besieged by unresolved crises and policy conflicts and perhaps best advised to be modest. Unabashed, Macron served up an amuse-bouche of what his vision might mean for France, for Europe, for Britain and for the world.

He lit up the Eiffel Tower in the EU colours (also the French embassy in London), ordered a gigantic EU flag to be flown at the Arc de Triomphe and went on television to devote a large part of his New Year’s Eve discourse to his fellow citizens to declare 2022 ‘a turning point’ for a Europe ‘more sovereign and more powerful’. The Élysée simultaneously published a grandiose 76-page plan for the French presidency, promising European solutions to the Covid crisis, action on climate change, a common defence policy, reform of the Schengen Agreement and more, including firm dealing with the UK on the Northern Ireland Protocol and fish.

Macron also wants an EU minimum wage, carbon taxes on products imported into Europe and more regulation and taxation of American tech giants like Amazon and Google. (It’s an ongoing embarrassment that the sclerotic EU has yet to produce a tech giant of its own to regulate or tax.)