What is motivating Macron’s self-destructive Brexit position?

As France prepared to go to the polls in the Spring of 2017, it was already probable that Emmanuel Macron would become president, and that would not be good news for Brexiting Britain. That anybody was shocked that Macron led the autodafé of Theresa May at the European council in Salzburg last week is therefore itself shocking. Most appalling of all is that Mrs May walked straight into it.

After he was elected president of France on the seventh of May last year, aged 39 3/4, Macron proclaimed his role model to be Jupiter, king of the gods. And by Jupiter! With his enormous parliamentary majority, subservient government, crushed opposition, and the hyperactive employment of the presidential jets, he took on not just the root and branch reform of France, but also that of the European Union, proposing deepening fiscal and defence links, with French leadership assumed, while incidentally cosying up to Donald Trump. If not Jupiterian, the vision was at least Napoleonic, especially now that Angela Merkel is left clinging to power by her Fingernägel after electoral misadventures of her own. That his poll standings suggest he is widely distrusted and disliked by French voters seems at this stage of the electoral cycle largely irrelevant.

Macron’s quasi-spiritual faith in the EU is long-embedded. It was nourished at the national administration academy (ENA) and then at Rothschild bank where he was a courtier to David de Rothschild, and then again at the ultra-elite levels of the French administration. He pledged from the very start of his remarkable march to the Elysée to put the EU at the centre of his project, and on Brexit, to protect the sanctity of single market access, or as ultra-liberals might describe it, the single-market protectionism dear to French leaders. His opinion that unrestricted access to the single market be limited to its members was an unveiled threat to Brexiting London, and anybody else with similar ideas.