Can Macron Defend Europe From the Nationalist Right?
To win the presidency in 2017, Emmanuel Macron had to reinvent himself. The insider turned outsider disrupted French politics, creating his own center-left party and promising to rescue the continent from a wave of euroskeptic populism. He beat the National Front’s Marine Le Pen—exactly the sort of nationalist who was threatening the liberal values that helped shape the European Union.
But a little over a year later, Macron is facing a greater challenge. With Germany’s Angela Merkel weakened, Italy’s radical new government threatening to launch a parallel national currency and the United Kingdom drifting toward a no-deal Brexit, the 40-year-old French president finds himself outnumbered by the EU’s increasingly right-wing leaders.
“It is up to us today to take our responsibilities and guarantee our own security, and thus have European sovereignty,” Macron said on August 27, adding that in the age of Donald Trump, Europe can no longer rely on the United States for security.
Energetic and unabashedly idealistic, Macron has promised to be “the president of all the patriots against the threat of all the nationalists.” While campaigning, he told voters, “We have to be amenable once again to creating grand narratives.” He urged them “to rediscover a taste for the future, rather than a morbid fascination for an uncertain past.”
But fear of immigration, economic weakness and Islamist terrorism are turning millions of Europeans away from grand ideals and narratives. As a result, from Hungary to Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and, most dramatically, Italy, anti-establishment and euroskeptic candidates have won power (or, in the case of Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, grown stronger).
At the same time, Merkel’s decision to allow a million migrants into Germany decimated her support and forced her into a coalition with partners less amenable to her
