France

Just two months from the presidential elections, Emmanuel Macron’s self-belief and risk-taking — not to mention setbacks — seem to know few bounds. And no more so than in foreign affairs. Following the French President’s telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine on 20 February, the Elysée triumphantly announced that a Biden-Putin summit was agreed in principle, only for the Kremlin to pour cold water on the idea the next morning. Washington then followed suit, before Putin announced the recognition of the two breakaway Ukrainian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

While the world is focused on Ukraine, Emmanuel Macron has withdrawn all French forces from Mali. Last weekend, thousands of soldiers were flown out of the former French colony after nine years of fighting Islamist insurgents in the Sahel. Malian protesters bid the French soldiers farewell by shouting ‘Shit to France’ at the departing planes. Following a military coup in May, Mali’s ‘interim President’ Colonel Assimi Goïta began to tire of the French and their calls for free elections. There were also lingering doubts over France’s motivation, stoked by a Russian disinformation campaign. So Goïta began looking for allies who could provide him with muscle to fight the Islamist insurgency without any lectures about democracy.

President Emmanuel Macron may or may not have imagined that his mission to Moscow would head off armed conflict in Ukraine. He will nevertheless have calculated that while his mission was an abject diplomatic failure, it was a modest political success. The French pro-Macron media (most of it) bigged up the visit as a triumph of French diplomacy and an affirmation of Macron’s global stature. Plus, all the jetting back and forth gave the President an excuse to further delay announcing his candidacy for the presidential election, the first round of which is in just 47 days. He might have failed to stop Putin’s aggression, but at least he was seen trying. That the deal he claimed with Putin was imaginary wasn’t really important.

Vladimir Putin does not think in the way the West does. Of course sanctions will hurt. But so what? He may be wrong in his strategic calculations, but he is not, as Boris Johnson claimed over the weekend, irrational. Putin is an old-school strategist. This is one of the reasons that sanctions will not have the desired impact. An import ban on Russian gas would definitely hurt the Russian economy, but that seems highly unlikely. Italian President Mario Draghi said on Friday that we should not touch gas. It is now the guy who sits in Moscow, rather than Draghi, who is willing to do ‘whatever it takes’. An import ban on the latest iPhones does not have the same deterrent effect as a continental gas shortage. Don’t fool yourself about the impact of sanctions.

In February 1995, Jacques Chirac was at 12 per cent in the polls. Two months later he was president. Two months is precisely the time remaining before the first round of voting in the 2022 presidential election. At the moment, President Macron’s advantage looks unassailable: the Economist’s tracker puts his chances of being re-elected at over 80 per cent. But just how unpredictable might this election be? After a few weeks of relative inertia, there are signs that the traditionally volatile French electorate are beginning to rumble. Last weekend, the campaigns shifted into a higher gear, and not necessarily to the advantage of the incumbent.

There are just 59 days to go until voters turn out for the first round of the French presidential election and it is not even clear who will make the starting gate. For now, all the pundits and the bookies are predicting the re-election of President Emmanuel Macron. But the real story is about how French democracy operates. General de Gaulle designed the Fifth Republic to keep extremists out of the Elysée. So, to get into the presidential election, a candidate must present the Conseil Constitutionnelle with 500 sponsorships (parrainages) from geographically dispersed senior elected officials. The real story is about how French democracy operates Previously this was not a problem.

A penny for the thoughts of Vladimir Putin on Monday as he stared at Emmanuel Macron from the end of a very long table. If the Russian leader has a sense of irony he might have been struggling to suppress a smirk as he welcomed the President of France to Moscow to discuss the situation in Ukraine. Macron was in his element as he played the international statesman representing the EU, but the President will be dismayed to learn that his grandstanding has not impressed the folks back home. Of the 140,000 who have so far responded to an online poll in Le Figaro, 60 per cent considered his visit to Moscow a failure. It doesn't appear to have yet dawned on Macron and many other western leaders that the days of dispensing lessons in democracy to despots are over.

Emmanuel Macron sees anti-Semitism everywhere except where it really lurks. Earlier this month his government accused protesters opposed to the Covid Passport of giving the Nazi salute, a charge that was disproved by video footage and this week dismissed by the public prosecutor’s office in Paris. Yesterday, in a speech to mark International Holocaust Day, Macron warned of the return of ‘an ill wind’ blowing through the continent in some ‘political discourse’. He vowed that France would never cease to honour the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust ‘particularly when some try to falsify it.

When French prime minister Jean Castex and health minister Olivier Véran held a press conference last week, they outlined the timetable for a gradual easing of the country's many Covid-19 restrictions. Véran talked of an 'encouraging evolution' in the fight against the virus, despite the fact that France had in the previous week recorded an average of over 300,000 daily cases.  As of 2 February, the wearing of masks outdoors will no longer be mandatory; a fortnight later, the French will be able to experience once more the pleasure of standing at a bar with a glass of whatever takes their fancy. Since the start of this month, this practice has been outlawed.