If elections were decided on voter enthusiasm rather than on plain numbers, Marine Le Pen would win this weekend’s battle for the French presidency. But it seems likely that Emmanuel Macron’s more numerous but less passionate supporters will prevail — more for dislike of her than admiration of him. It is when he ends up in the Elysée that his problems will start. Can a president without a party command support in the National Assembly? Who will he appoint to his government? How quickly might it unravel? Domestic woes will likely consume Macron, with foreign policy a luxury he might not be able to afford.
Reports of his hostility to Brexit are exaggerated: his adviser Jean Pisani-Ferry wrote a paper highlighting the folly of being beastly to the British. This is the logical position — a free-trade deal with the UK is in line with French national and economic interest. But if the EU were governed by logic, it would not be in the mess it is today and the British public would probably not have voted to leave.
The election of Macron is likely to further strengthen the position of Angela Merkel, who has made it her political mission to keep the EU intact. She is not always very good at this. Had she agreed to David Cameron’s suggestion to renegotiate a new deal with Britain, with emergency brake powers over immigration, then he would have been able to say that the EU had listened, and was reforming. Merkel’s intransigence was perhaps the biggest single factor in the failure of Britain’s last attempt to negotiate with the EU. It remains a problem now.
Even now, the German political class cannot quite bring itself to believe that Brexit is happening, and suspects that it can be averted if only British voters can be won round — hence Angela Merkel’s willingness to put the principle of holding the EU together above the pragmatic interests of her own exporters.
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