Russia and China: French President Emmanuel Macron persists in his desire to make France a power capable of speaking to everyone, at the risk of damaging its image in part of Europe and in the United States.
However, note some experts, the controversial remarks in the West are also addressed to a whole part of the world animated by an anti-Western feeling which could welcome the posture of non-alignment with the first two powers of the world.
The Élysée host caused an outcry at the end of his state visit to China by telling journalists from Politico and the daily The echoes that Europe should not automatically align itself with the United States or China in the event of a conflict over Taiwan.
He had already sparked controversy, as in June 2022, when he argued that Russia should not be “humiliated” in order to find a diplomatic “way out” when Russians and Ukrainians lay down their arms.
“Emmanuel Macron’s image is more than chipped, it is chipped,” said Michel Duclos, special adviser at the Institut Montaigne, underlining the questioning of the credibility of the French president.
The French head of state had, he said, “an asset in international meetings: he was thought to be more intelligent than the others”. From now on, he appears as an “unreliable leader on an extraordinarily complex, sensitive, explosive subject”.
For the French researcher Bruno Tertrais, from the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS), “it is a sequence that risks anchoring a little more in Europe and the United States the image of an Emmanuel Macron inclined to provocation on sensitive international issues”.
However, he notes that after six years at the head of France, the president “continues to fascinate and does not arouse the rejection that some of his predecessors had aroused”.
In addition, he observes, Emmanuel Macron can rely on his “longevity” and “his seniority”. “It counts,” he said, “in the European Council and in the North Atlantic Council. »
“Self-marginalization”?
Certainly, adds the expert, the criticisms of “politicians and leading commentators” have “an impact on the general perception of French politics”.
But the lack of reaction from most of Emmanuel Macron’s main counterparts illustrates that they “are used to the French president’s outbursts” and know that they “often reflect more his freedom, even his desire to provocate, in informal interviews.
For Michel Duclos, the risk nevertheless remains that these provocations “lead to a self-marginalization of France” which will reinforce ultimately American leadership.
Bertrand Badie, professor and specialist in international relations at Sciences Po Paris, notes that “the howls come from fairly marginal characters”.
And the silence of Macron’s main interlocutors, like the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, testifies according to him that fundamentally, they do not disagree on the approach with China or on the need to ensure European sovereignty.
“It’s a storm in a teacup,” he said of the controversy of the past few days.
Furthermore, he notes that while France’s stance on non-alignment may “irritate part of Europe, the Western world or even the French political class, it could be relatively well perceived in the world” beyond China, which did not fail to praise the comments of the French president.
In African countries, which do not feel concerned for example by the war in Ukraine, the “exasperation” is palpable and Macron’s position could thus be welcomed.
According to him, the French president has also understood that emerging countries like India or Brazil, or an organization like the African Union (AU), are no longer “extras” or secondary actors.
And in a context of France’s “discomfiture” in Africa, “successive slaps in the greater Middle East, Lebanon, Syria or Iran”, the president is trying to get out “of the Western bastion to say ‘we is in the world and because we are in the world, Europe must be built in the world”.
“It’s a dialectic that is more subtle than it seems,” concludes Bertrand Badie.