Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen is greeted by French president Emmanuel Macron outside the Elysée Palace in Paris, June 9 (Elysée)
Emmanuel Macron, the new French president, has given cabinet posts to politicians from the center-left and the center-right who supported him in the election.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, a Socialist Party veteran who endorsed Macron rather than his own party’s candidate, Benoît Hamon, was named foreign minister on Wednesday. He served as defense minister under the previous president, François Hollande.
Gérard Collomb, another leftist who broke with the Socialist Party to support Macron, has been rewarded with the Interior Ministry. (more…)
Emmanuel Macron, France’s former economy minister, has defeated far-right leader Marine Le Pen with 66 to 34 percent support.
Macron is slated to be inaugurated as the eighth president of the Fifth Republic next week. He will serve a five-year term.
His next test will come in June, when France holds parliamentary elections. Macron’s centrist En Marche! has no seats in the National Assembly. (more…)
Former French economy minister Emmanuel Macron changes his tie on a train, December 31, 2016 (En Marche!)
For once, the French are spoilt for choice.
Their presidential elections used to be a battle for the center between the mainstream left and the mainstream right. Now there are five candidates with a reasonable chance of qualifying for the second voting round in May, including a big-government socialist, a small-government conservative, a nationalist of the left and a nationalist of the right.
Our sympathies lie with the fifth man in the middle: Emmanuel Macron. Comfortable with neither the statist inclinations of the Socialist Party nor the social conservatism of the Republicans, he launched his own progressive movement last year for the rejuvenation of France. It represents the best alternative to the anti-globalism of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen. (more…)
French party leader Marine Le Pen makes her way to a news conference in Strasbourg, May 11, 2016 (European Parliament/Fred Marvaux)
Polls suggest five candidates could qualify for the decisive second voting round of the French presidential election.
They range from the far left to the far right, but a look at their policies suggests that these categories may have outlived their usefulness.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen are supposed to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum, yet they make common cause against the European Union and NATO.
The center-right candidate, François Fillon, shares their friendly attitudes toward Russia. But Fillon sides with the left-wing Benoît Hamon and the center-left Emmanuel Macron in arguing for a more political eurozone.
Le Pen’s economic policies have more in common with the left than the mainstream right. Fillon and Macron, on the other hand, share proposals for labor reform — but they have different social views. The Republican is a Catholic and social conservative who agrees with Le Pen that the French must protect their identity. The independent Macron is socially liberal and pro-immigration.
All candidates want cleaner energy, but where Fillon, Macron and Le Pen see nuclear as part of the solution, Hamon and Mélenchon want to phase it out alongside fossil fuels.
Here is an overview of the signature policies of all five candidates. (more…)
Night falls on the Bourbon Palace, seat of the French National Assembly, in Paris, June 8, 2007 (J.R. Rosenberg)
Neither of the two frontrunners in the French presidential election is likely to win a majority in the National Assembly, which would make it hard for them to govern.
The centrist Emmanuel Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen are neck and neck in the polls for the first voting round this month. Macron is expected to prevail in the second round.
A former economy minister under François Hollande, Macron left the Socialist Party last year to start his own movement.
Le Pen leads the anti-EU and anti-immigrant National Front, which currently has just two out 577 seats in the French parliament. (more…)
Former French prime minister Manuel Valls has thrown his support behind the presidential candidacy of Emmanuel Macron, his former economy minister.
“I don’t think we should take any risk for the republic and so I will vote for Emmanuel Macron,” the Spanish-born social democrat said.
Valls sought the presidential nomination of his own Socialist Party but was defeated in January by the far-left Benoît Hamon. His center-left policies are closer to Macron’s, who served together with Valls in François Hollande’s government for two years. The two men cut taxes for employers and loosened labor laws. (more…)
Former French prime minister François Fillon meets with other European conservative party leaders in Brussels, March 1, 2012 (EPP)
Benoît Hamon and Emmanuel Macron don’t have a lot in common. The former wants to raise taxes in France in order to finance a universal basic income. The latter wants to cut taxes and reduce public spending.
Yet the two presidential candidates made common cause on Monday, when they faced three Putin apologists in the first televised debate of the 2017 campaign. (more…)
French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has said France must prove itself to Germany in order to breathe new life into the partnership that has been at the heart of the European project for decades.
French politicians have long wished for a restoration of parity between Europe’s two largest economies.
Macron told the financial newspaper Les Echos that his country cannot expect Germany to take French proposals seriously unless its finds the courage to do structural reforms:
The usual gesture in French presidential campaigns is to say, “I will turn over the tables and reorient the Franco-German relationship.” That doesn’t make sense and it never works.
The former investment banker and economy minister, who is one of the favorites to succeed François Hollande as president in May, reiterated a French proposal to create a European economy and finance minister to oversee hundreds of billions of euros in investments across the eurozone.
Germany has resisted this, fearing that spendthrift Mediterraneans will use an investment fund as a way to circumvent deficit rules and forego liberalizations. (more…)
The good news just keeps coming for Emmanuel Macron.
Perennial French presidential candidate François Bayrou endorsed his fellow centrist on Wednesday and announced he would not run this year.
Bayrou, a self-described third-way centrist, was a candidate in 2002, 2007 and 2012. Each time, he failed to qualify for the second-round runoff.
For the elections in April and May, Bayrou had been polling at 5-6 percent support. If all his voters switch to Macron, the former economy minister would easily best the right-wing candidate, François Fillon, and qualify for the crucial second voting round against the National Front’s Marine Le Pen. (more…)
After Britain voted to exit the European Union and America elected Donald Trump, the French ambassador to Washington DC, Gerard Araud, tweeted in despair: “A world is collapsing before our eyes.”
Now his home country has a chance to breathe new life into the liberal world order the English-speaking powers have turned their backs on.
After decades of statism, and five years of ineffectual Socialist Party rule, there is finally a critical mass for reform in France.
Brexit has also revived French enthusiasm for the European project. French support for the EU has shot up 10 points to 67 percent, according to an Ifop poll.
And Trump’s crude nationalism is showing the French the ugly reality of hysterical patriotism and anti-Muslim bigotry, both of which have been creeping up on them in recent years.
These three threads come together in the presidential candidacy of Emmanuel Macron. (more…)
Former French economy minister Emmanuel Macron changes his tie on a train, December 31, 2016 (En Marche!)
Emmanuel Macron’s chances of winning the French presidency have never looked so good.
Recent surveys have him neck and neck with the conservative candidate, François Fillon. In some, he is even beating Fillon into third place, which would give Macron a spot in the second-round runoff against Marine Le Pen.
What’s changed from a few weeks ago, when Macron was in third place, is that the Socialists have nominated a far-leftist, Benoît Hamon, for the presidency and Fillon has been caught up in an expenses scandal. (more…)
By picking Benoît Hamon, a relatively inexperienced far-leftist, over the reformer Manuel Valls on Sunday to lead the French Socialist Party into the elections in April and May, the left may have thrown away what little chance it had of retaining the presidency.
Emmanuel Macron must be smiling. The defeat of his former boss could have hardly come at a better moment for the former economy minister, who is running for president independently.
Earlier this week, it emerged that his Republican opponent, François Fillon, had paid his wife around €500,000 from parliamentary funds over a period of eight years for an assistant’s job when it is unclear she did the work. (more…)
Emmanuel Macron, France’s former economy minister, made official on Wednesday what political observers had suspected for months: he is running for president next year.
Although the announcement was a long time coming, it could still have an unexpected impact on the contest, which so far has seemed certain to end in victory for the center-right candidate, Alain Juppé. (more…)
French economy minister Emmanuel Macron stepped down on Tuesday, presumably to plan a presidential candidacy for the election next year.
“I have touched the limits of our system, the last-minute compromises, its imperfect solutions,” Macron said in a speech. “I want to start a new phase of my fight today.”
He stopped short of revealing his presidential ambitions, but coming four months after the launch of his own centrist political movement, En Marche!, there is little doubt in France what the former investment banker is up to. (more…)
