Emmanuel Macron “clumsy, he always wants to ideologize every political move, to the point that it backfires”. Jean Pierre Darnis, a professor at Luiss in Rome and at the University of the Côte d’Azur, is clear in his analysis of the statements of the French president, released in two interviews at the end of his visit to China – “Europeans are not vassals of Beijing and Washington” – which irritated the allies. “Either he is super-Machiavellian and said those things to distract from the protests for the pension reform – comments the French expert with Adnkronos – or the president was clumsy and spoke too much”.
Macron should “remain calm, he should be prudent and instead – disputes Darnis – he is moved by an irrepressible desire to ideologize any political move, to make it part of some grand design. And this cannot go well in an inconsistent and contradictory situation” like that current. In France, before his mission to Beijing, to which the president wanted to give a European ‘cover’ by inviting Ursula von der Leyen, there was already a debate on the appropriateness of this visit, but if you then also make “a specific claim, as if we were before Covid or the war in Ukraine, arguing that Europe has become strategically autonomous, while in fact on the military side there has been an absolute return of the United States and NATO, then the least is that you annoy the Americans and the most Atlanticist allies”, reasons the expert, professor of contemporary history at the Roman university.
According to Darnis, “going back to being your country’s trade representative in a context in which it is essential for European security to remain close to the United States and in which the regression in China on the issue of rights cannot be ignored, means taking your strategic ultra-rationality in a context that does not lend itself because it is fluid and turns against you”.
Basically, according to the French expert, the trip itself would not have been “particularly shameful, Macron had not tripped anyone, the French in general and him in particular, a bit like the Italians, always say that one must keep the channels of dialogue open”. The problem is that, underlines Darnis, “he deludes himself that he can do something”, he hoped to achieve something with Xi Jinping as he had tried with Vladimir Putin, “he deludes himself that he has a strategic capacity which instead he does not have because the weight of France, which is a medium power, won’t allow it”.
In this historical phase “there are a series of obvious contradictions that should lead to a little prudence – warns the professor again, in a reference to the role of China – but if, instead of being cautious in the face of those contradictions, you not only go place a few things, but you make a global political discourse with neo-Gaullist tones which you are then forced to correct, you alienate your allies”.
As with the pension reform, Macron has shown in these interviews that he has “enormous political communication difficulties, both internally and externally”, comments Darnis.
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