President Emmanuel Macron of France has announced a startling new government that crosses party lines and is unabashed about its enthusiastic support for the European Union (EU). He looks ready to tackle France’s two main challenges — starting reform of the EU and its troubled management of the euro. In addition, he should also find the political will to do what successive presidents have failed to do and liberalise France’s sclerotic laws restricting business and labour.
But he will need to move fast. He has a strong personal standing at present, which is undented by reality and boosted by hope. So he can take a look at the reforms that former French presidents Nicolas Sarkozy tried and Francois Hollande tragically reversed. He has to be ready to confront armies of red flag-waving unionists marching in every city of France, burning his effigy as an enemy of the cosseted people of France who had generations of benefit from one of Europe’s most generous welfare systems.
Macron may or may not win a decent parliamentary majority to back his plans, and his totally untested political movement En Marche may have won him a personal election, but it will be very hard to translate that into the necessary machine to win enough seats and then muster the deputies in parliament. He will need every bit of support his heterogeneous cabinet can offer him, and that may do the trick. It includes plenty of people with good experience — such as the centre-right Edouarde Philippe, who is the new Prime Minister, and Bruno Le Maire, who will be the economy minister — just in time to tell the Republican voters that they can abandon their right-wing party and vote En Marche with safety in the parliamentary elections next month.
Macron is well aware of the problems in Europe, but is coming at them with a fresh enthusiasm for sorting them out. He will have a very different perspective from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the battered veteran of endless euro battles, and he is eager to look at the necessary structural reforms that the EU and Eurozone management desperately requires.
The arrival of a strong European politician at the heart of the EU will change the tone of debate for the better, but he will need to take care of Merkel’s own September election after which, the Franco-German axis at the heart of Europe can seek its future with more confidence.
