Emmanuel Macron will have to make a decisive move on Europe
The most exciting promise of his candidacy is the agenda for eurozone reform
Emmanuel Macron has a convincing lead in the polls, but a low turnout among his more reluctant supporters could still produce a result too close for comfort.
The final round of the French presidential election on May 7 should not really be a contest. Mr Macron has the backing of more or less the entire political establishment — from the left to the centre-right. But events can intrude even in such a situation and already have. His decision to celebrate his first-round victory in a smart brasserie in Paris’s sixth arrondissement was politically illiterate. During a visit to a Whirlpool factory in Amiens, northern France, Mr Macron was upstaged by his opponent, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right National Front. As a political campaigner she is in a different league. If she crushes him in Wednesday’s television debate, she might have a chance.
The problem with Mr Macron’s agenda is that nobody really knows how he can make it work. The role of the French president is powerful, but the fate of François Hollande should serve as a cautionary tale of the limits of what a president can do.
Mr Hollande’s Socialists at least had a majority in the National Assembly, the French parliament. It is not clear whether Mr Macron will have a single MP after the legislative elections in June. Will he end up as a mere figurehead — like the German president — whose job is to shake hands and give grand speeches? Or can he find a way to force change?
The single most exciting promise of Mr Macron is his agenda for the eurozone. He has proposed reforms to the governance of the eurozone very much in line with what I have been suggesting in this column over the years: a common fiscal policy, a joint finance minister, a eurozone debt instrument, and completion of the banking union.
Mr Macron deserves support for this reason alone. But he owes his voters an answer to the question of what he would do if, as is likely, Germany replies to his four proposals with: nein, nein, nein and nein. Would he acquiesce or would he put pressure on Berlin? If the latter, what kind of pressure? Assuming he would not threaten a French exit from the eurozone, what else might he do? If the answer is “not much”, would we not be justified in wondering just how different a Macron presidency is going to be from that of Mr Hollande? This is precisely the point Ms Le Pen is making — that Mr Macron, a former economic counsellor to the outgoing president and a former economics minister, does not really stand for change.
At this point the nature of the choice between the two candidates would change. This would then no longer be a choice between global and provincial France. It would be a choice between an unsustainable status quo and change. If you phrase the choice this way, abstention — a choice being contemplated by many of those who voted for the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round — suddenly becomes intellectually defensible.
In the remaining days of the campaign, therefore, Mr Macron should specify the minimum he will insist on.
On eurozone governance reforms that minimum needs to be ambitious, but realistic. He will not get Germany to sign up to his entire agenda, but a compromise may be possible.
Mr Macron will need to persuade his future German counterpart that governance reforms are in their interest too. He is probably the man best placed to do this. But Berlin has not given any official assurances yet.
If I were him, I would reduce the scope of the agenda and deepen it instead. This would involve dropping the eurobonds and fiscal integration, and focusing on banking union. Mr Macron should say that this is the minimum it will take for France to stay in the eurozone. That is still a pro-European position, even though it includes an implicit threat. It is credible because it addresses the eurozone’s most fundamental problem.
What we have today is not a real banking union. You can speak of a banking union when banks no longer hold the sovereign bonds of their governments, and when a government is no longer in a position to stop the closure of a domestic bank. Banking union means that you take the nation state out of banking.
In such a union, the Germans would get a much stronger no-bail out commitment. If the financial system is ringfenced, there is no reason why member states should not default on their sovereign debt.
If Mr Macron succeeds, we would have reason to be optimistic about the future of the EU. But if the promise of a new direction turns out merely to be a reaffirmation of the old dispensation, we should expect to see a President Le Pen, if not this year, then in 2022. By then, the French will have tried everything else.