French President Emmanuel Macron is to host US President Donald Trump today for Bastille Day talks, which coincide with the 100th anniversary of US involvement in World War I. The meeting, between two leaders vastly different in age and political philosophies, will be intriguing for the common ground that they seek to find.
Trump has referred to his “great” relationship with Macron, and it is true that they share political positioning as perceived insurgent outsiders with a business background. Moreover, the two have a number of shared international objectives, including countering international terrorism in France, for instance, the second largest contributor to the US-led coalition in Syria.
Yet, while both Macron and Trump have political reasons to court each other, the context for the meeting is the stark policy divergences. Already the two presidents have clashed over issues including the Paris climate change treaty and international trade, which highlights the global ramifications of the discussion.
Macron’s victory in May against Trump’s preferred far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen defied the march of right-wing populism in numerous countries, which has seen parties of the left and center ground sometimes taking a political battering. Trump’s surprise victory in November last year against former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton epitomized this conservative tide.
However, beyond classical political notions of left and right, a key dividing line that has become more salient in international politics is between a liberal cosmopolitan pole and a populist (or even xenophobic authoritarian) one. This liberal cosmopolitan versus populist battle, which played out in Trump’s victory against Clinton, was widely seen as a factor in the Brexit vote in June last year, too.
Yet, defying many expectations earlier this year, there has been a turnaround — in Europe at least — with the victory of not just Macron, but also the Dutch Liberals over the far-right, populist Freedom Party in the Netherlands, and also the Austrian presidential election, which saw the convincing defeat of Freedom Party leader Norbert Hofer, who would have become Europe’s first far-right head of state since 1945.
Time will tell how significant this turnaround in fortunes proves to be for those forces championing the political center ground.
For now, at least, it is Macron’s victory, especially remarkable given his meteoric rise earlier this year, which is being looked to by many for potential lessons to other left and centrist politicians in coming years.
This is because victory came Macron’s way by proving a foil to Le Pen and fellow conservative and other populists by positioning himself against the old left and right.
His candidacy was driven, in part, by his pioneering of a new political movement, En Marche (“On the Move”), which has at least temporarily filled a significant vacuum of power created by the disenchantment with the established center-right Republicans Party and the center-left Socialists.
A second factor driving Macron’s success is his relative youth at 39, plus the fact that he had never held office before: He has the appearance of change to many voters and is the youngest-ever French president in the Fifth Republic.
What Macron’s success also appears to underline is that politicians of the center ground benefit from having an optimistic, forward-looking vision for tackling complex, long-term policy challenges, such as tackling stagnant living standards and re-engaging people with the political process, to help build public consensus and confidence around solutions to them.
France has been suffering from economic pain since at least the 2008-2009 international financial crisis, and has suffered years of double-digit unemployment and low growth (only 1.4 percent this year) driving discontent with the “status quo.”
Tackling tough-to-solve, first-order challenges in this context is a significant hurdle that centrist politicians across much of the world are widely perceived to have failed on, helping give rise to perceptions of a broken process and that democracy itself is failing. This is a factor Macron has skillfully navigated — at least to date.
Of course, the perceived failure of conventional politics created not just the political “window of opportunity” for Macron to win, but also Le Pen too to proper with the often half-baked, damaging agendas she and other populist politicians often champion.
Contrary to what some of this ilk assert, there is no “silver bullet” agenda that can address overnight challenges such as stagnant living standards.
Instead, long-term, concerted efforts are needed to better address these issues through a range of educational, home affairs, economic and other policies.
As Macron has flagged, such an agenda — which he believes might require very significant reform in France in coming years — can move toward demonstrating more effectively how a fair, inclusive democratic politics can help overcome or ameliorate the challenges that many people are experiencing in a world changing fast in the face of globalization.
In this context, Macron is now likely to try to push as fast as possible with his reformist agenda to overhaul the country’s politics and economy. This includes proposed labor laws to try to reduce the unemployment rate of about 10 percent and also reindustrialize France through innovation-led policies. Collectively, this could provide a major fillip to the eurozone’s second-largest economy.
Yet, Macron’s ultimate success in coming years is by no means guaranteed. France’s political mood remains volatile, and although the electorate has decided to favor hope over anger, for now, sky-high expectations about his presidency — not dissimilar to former US president Barack Obama in 2008 — means there remains a key danger that he will not be able to realize the hopes that are held about him.
If he fails, the primary beneficiary might well be Trump’s political soulmate, Le Pen. Despite her loss in May, she secured more than 40 percent of the vote, a big increase from the last time the far-right got to the final round, and she is young enough to run in presidential elections into the 2020s.
Andrew Hammond is an associate at the London School of Economics’ LSE IDEAS think tank.
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