French President Emmanuel Macron has been crusading to all corners of the world, receiving applause for his impassioned pleas on behalf of the postwar liberal order in the face of rising authoritarianism and nationalism.
This spring, in his address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the new French leader compared the ongoing political divisions within Europe to a “civil war” and pledged to never “yield to any fascination for authoritarian sovereignties” — a clear reference to the ongoing democratic backslide in Hungary and Poland.
“I do not want to be part of a generation of sleepwalkers,” the 40-year-old president declared. “I want to belong to a generation which has made a firm decision to uphold its democracy.” He also pledged to “defend European sovereignty because we fought for it.”
A few days later, the French president was in Washington DC as President Donald Trump’s first visiting head of state. In his address to the US Congress, Macron reiterated the need to stand up for democracy and urged lawmakers to preserve and strengthen the liberal international order the US itself helped to create. “The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism,” Macron said. “You are the one now, who has to help preserve and reinvent it.”
Yet in practice, Macron’s own relationship to democracy has often contradicted his lofty rhetoric. Although 63 percent of French people think Macron has improved the image of France abroad, 58 percent are dissatisfied with his presidency — and 73 percent described him as authoritarian, according to a recent IFOP poll. And no wonder: Macron has repeatedly undermined democratic processes in France to implement his unpopular neoliberal reforms.
As a former investment banker at Rothschild, Macron envisions the transformation and revitalization of France through a Silicon-Valley-style neoliberalism, which embraces the “creative destruction” theory of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. And,…