What a forty eight hours it has been for Emmanuel Macron. On Monday, he gave his regal address to the National Assembly at the Palace of Versailles, a grandiose occasion during which the French president rivalled Tony Blair and Barack Obama for swaggering self-confidence. As Jonathan Miller said in the Spectator, it’s hard not to be ‘cowed by the absolute bravado of the young president’. Then, on Tuesday, Macron’s prime minister, Édouard Philippe, presented to the Assembly his government’s programme for the next five years. As is the tradition, the MPs were asked at the end of the general policy speech to give the PM their backing. Of the 577 MPs in the Assembly, only 67 dared vote against the government – the fewest number to oppose a Premier Minister’s programme since 1959. So the coup is complete. Emmanuel Macron has swept to power, as has his En Marche! party, and with an unprecedented majority in the Assembly, the president has carte blanche to reform and revitalise France.
While Philippe was addressing the parliament on Tuesday, Macron visited France’s nuclear submarine base in Brittany.
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