The great and the good of this world met in Davos this week to tell each other how wonderful they are. But amid all the bonhomie and back-slapping there loomed the spectre of You-Know-Who.
Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the Iowa caucuses was his first significant step towards a second term in the White House. His first was bad enough for the Davos set, but the possibility that Trump and his Deplorables might triumph in November is too much for many to bear.
Macron believes he’s the top dog among the 27 EU leaders
Last week, Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank, described Trump as ‘clearly a threat’ to Europe because his ideas on the environment and trade are out of sync with their own. Her views were echoed this week at Davos by Philipp Hildebrand, an influential Swiss financier, who declared that four more years of Trump ‘would challenge Europe fundamentally’.
When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, the sigh of relief from Brussels could be heard on Capitol Hill. ‘The inauguration of Joe Biden opens a welcome new chapter in EU-US relations,’ simpered the EU. ‘There is much to repair and rebuild, both at home and abroad. But this is above all a moment of opportunity. We as EU are ready to revive our partnership.’
But Sleepy Joe wasn’t. In 2022, a furious EU accused the US of ‘profiting’ from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by selling gas at exorbitant prices. There have also been disagreements about how to deal with China and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which French president Emmanuel Macron described as ‘super aggressive’ to French and European companies.
Biden may be a profiteer and a protectionist. But he is – or at least the people who run his administration are – also a progressive, and that will always make him far more palatable to Davos than The Donald.
But there is one European leader who might secretly be hoping for another Trump presidency – and that’s Macron. Ever since he came to power, Macron has dreamed of closer EU integration, of France being absorbed into a United States of Europe. He first outlined this vision at a speech at the Sorbonne in September 2017. With Trump in the White House, explained Macron, there was a ‘gradual and inevitable disengagement by the United States’ from the West. Consequently Europe had been exposed as ‘too weak, too slow, too inefficient’ and so the EU must embark on ‘the route of rebuilding a sovereign, united and democratic Europe’.
Macron returned to this theme in January 2022 when France assumed the rotating presidency of the EU for six months. In a speech to mark the event, Macron proclaimed that European unity is ‘indispensable’ and he also ordered the EU flag to be flown from the Arc de Triomphe.
The French right was enraged, as it was again at the start of this month when the blue and gold of the EU flag was on prominent display in the Invalides, a site of military pride for the Republic. The occasion was the funeral of Jacques Delors, often described as the ‘architect’ of the EU. But that was of no relevance to one right-wing MP, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who tweeted. ‘After the European flag under the Arc de Triomphe, Emmanuel Macron continues his demolition of France by seeking to accustom the French to the disappearance of our nation.’
When Macron was elected president, the de facto leader of Europe was Angela Merkel. She is no more and her successor, Olaf Scholz, has proved to be a weak and uninspiring chancellor. Relations between France and Germany are ‘strained’ over a number of issues, an antagonism exacerbated by the frosty personal relationship between Macron and Scholz.
Macron believes he’s the top dog among the 27 EU leaders – probably one of the reasons he was in Davos on Wednesday. The president was the only head of state from the G7 countries to show up and he was duly treated like royalty.
Macron made the keynote speech in Davos, and Klaus Schwab, the leader of the World Economic Forum, introduced him to the audience as a man whose ‘heart beats for Europe’. In his address, Macron once again criticised Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and and said that Europe must ‘transition towards greater sovereignty in defence, clean energy generation and essential technologies’. Macron also described 2024 as a ‘watershed moment’ for Europe, the year when the EU ‘will be in a position to decide if we want to be sovereign or not’.
A Trump victory in November would hasten Macron’s ambition for a United States of Europe (USE). So reviled is Trump by the European elite that they would regard a ‘disengagement’ from his America as a merciful release.
It will take a while for the USE to materialise and of course they’ll need to elect a president. There will be only one contender: the globalists’ golden boy, the darling of the Davos set and the man who was recently mocked by Donald Trump. If you thought Macron’s pomposity couldn’t get any worse, just wait until he’s the president of the United States of Europe.
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