His joint initiative with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer to assemble a \u201ccoalition of the willing\u201d remains the only game in town when it comes to supporting any eventual peace deal in Ukraine. \u201cIt\u2019s not good for the EU if one of the biggest member states is in turmoil, especially in the current security situation,\u201d the same eurozone official said.<\/p>\n
A muscular \u201cFranco-German engine\u201d \u2014\u00a0with powerful leaders working together in Paris and Berlin \u2014 is conventionally seen as essential to making the EU strong and efficient. Macron\u2019s travails make that far harder to achieve, even with a new leader in Germany in Friedrich Merz, who is seen in Brussels as far more dynamic than his predecessor.<\/p>\n
A French official from the cabinet of an outgoing minister acknowledged the problem. \u201cThis leaves France absent at a time when Russia is making incursions into European territories, [when] China has incredible industrial overcapacity, and [when] Trump\u2019s United States continues to do silly things,\u201d the person said. \u201cI think France\u2019s leadership will be missing. It\u2019s impossible for France to give what France has to give under these conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the question of what, or who, comes next. If Macron does trigger new elections, the French far right stands to gain, although the RN\u2019s poll share has remained broadly stable at around 30 percent to 32 percent since the 2024 legislative elections.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Europe\u2019s far right has been emboldened by Macron\u2019s struggles, even before Monday\u2019s government collapse. Le Pen, the godmother of the National Rally, celebrated the victory of rightist-populist Andrej Babi\u0161 in last weekend\u2019s election in the Czech Republic \u2014 and used Monday\u2019s crisis to reiterate her calls for a new election.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Geert Wilders, the veteran far-right Dutch firebrand who won the most seats in the last election in the Netherlands, had a warning for \u201call the old leaders,\u201d including Macron, earlier this year: \u201cYour time is over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sarah Paillou contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"His joint initiative with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer to assemble a \u201ccoalition of the willing\u201d remains the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[2000,299,36],"class_list":{"0":"post-479547","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-france"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115330838924435428","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}