Emmanuel Macron: Europe’s Last Adult in the Room or the Fastest to the Exit?
Emmanuel Macron: Europe’s Last Adult in the Room, or Just the Fastest to the Exit?
by Dave’s Locker International Correspondent
Paris—In the grand global theatre where most leaders arrive with the subtlety of a chainsaw juggling act, Emmanuel Macron glides onstage like a philosophy professor who accidentally wandered into a bar fight. Tailored suit, unblinking eye contact, and the faint whiff of existential dread—he is, depending on whom you ask, either the final firewall against populist arson or merely the most articulate arsonist still holding a lighter behind his back.
The world has learned to watch France the way one watches a laboratory rat on espresso: fascinating, occasionally brilliant, prone to spontaneous combustion. Macron’s every move—whether lecturing the G-20 on “civilizational challenges” or speed-dialling Vladimir Putin from a presidential jet—carries the weight of a continent that still pretends to matter while nervously checking its own pulse. Europe, after all, is the retirement community of great powers: lawns immaculately trimmed, pensions underfunded, and the guard at the gate asleep with a podcast on low-volume stoicism.
Macron’s signature trick is to sound loftier than his actual leverage. He calls for “European strategic autonomy” while German factories hum to the tune of Russian molecules and Chinese rare earths. He warns that NATO is suffering “brain death,” then signs off on every communiqué the alliance produces because, well, no one else is offering better life support. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of telling your spouse you’re “re-evaluating the relationship” while quietly renewing the joint Netflix subscription.
Across the Atlantic, U.S. presidents treat him as the friend who quotes Montaigne at a barbecue: impressive, slightly irritating, and absolutely necessary when the grill catches fire. Joe Biden nods respectfully at Macron’s sermons on multilateralism, then sells Australia nuclear submarines behind his back—a diplomatic wedgie known in Canberra as the “AUKUS incident” and in Paris as “that week we recalled our ambassadors and drank even more.” Macron’s revenge? A press conference delivered in English so flawless it felt like trolling with an Oxford accent.
To the east, the Kremlin measures Macron by the only metric it respects: body count. Putin listens to the French president’s 100-minute monologues on European values and calculates the cubic metres of gas required to freeze them. Yet even Moscow concedes that Macron has mastered the art of appearing indispensable while delivering nothing the bear truly wants—except perhaps the spectacle of a Western leader still willing to pick up the phone at 2 a.m. for a chat about “de-escalation,” a word now ranked somewhere between “unicorn” and “balanced budget” on the credibility index.
Down in the Global South, Macron is viewed through the lens of historical hangover. Former colonies note his habit of praising “shared memory” while refusing to return looted artifacts, a maneuver known in museum circles as “the eternal loan.” During a 2023 tour of Sub-Saharan Africa, he told students in Kinshasa that France is “not your big brother anymore.” The applause was polite; the memes were not.
Yet for all the eye-rolling, Macron remains the closest thing the West has to a hedge bet. In a G-7 lineup that includes a British prime minister who lasts roughly as long as a lettuce and an Italian one who channels Instagram influencers, Macron’s longevity looks almost Roman. He has survived the gilets jaunes, pension riots, and revelations about his bodyguard beating protestors in a fake police helmet—a scandal French voters shrugged off with the same energy Americans reserve for celebrity DUIs. The secret? While others promise utopia, Macron promises competence, a commodity so rare voters will forgive the smirk that comes with it.
Internationally, that translates into a curious form of soft power: Macron is everyone’s second choice, which in 2024 is tantamount to destiny. Washington prefers him to Le Pen, Berlin prefers him to Meloni, Beijing prefers him to whomever Washington prefers—because nothing lubricates trade like predictability wrapped in haute couture. In the great poker game of multipolar disorder, Macron is the chip everyone keeps pushing to the middle, half-hoping it will become a joker, half-terrified it won’t.
So as COP summits dissolve into photo-ops and BRICS meetings resemble family reunions where no one admits they’re bankrupt, Macron continues to float above the fray, the last man in Europe still bothering to conjugate “civilisation” correctly. Whether this makes him a visionary or merely the final passenger polishing the brass on the Titanic is, naturally, above his pay grade. But until the water reaches the hem of his impeccable trousers, he will stand at the podium, eyebrow arched, offering the world a glass of Château d’Yquem and a PowerPoint on resilience—because if the ship must sink, one might as well do it with a Bordeaux in hand and a five-point plan titled “Refloating Europe.”
The rest of us, clutching our life jackets and TikTok accounts, can only toast the audacity. À la tienne, Monsieur le Président. Try not to spill on the deck chairs.
