Macron and Starmer: mutual dilemmas
Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer probably have more in common than any two previous leaders of France and Britain in history. They arrived at the top of government with very little electoral or political experience. Macron’s first election was in 2017, when he became president; his second in 1922, when he was easily re-elected.
Starmer’s first election was in 2015, when he inherited a safe Labour seat in North London. He had a second walkover election a year ago, after the fastest collapse of a major party, the Conservatives, in European political history.
Today, though, both men are very low in the polls. Neither has any real control over their parliament. Macron called an unnecessary early election for the National Assembly in Paris, which saw Marine Le Pen emerge as leader of the biggest party. Since then all lawmaking in France has been blocked, including major reforms of the welfare state.
Starmer has an enormous majority but his attempts at reforming Britain’s welfare state — which is now one of the most expensive in Europe — collapsed last week in division and derision, as the Parliamentary Labour Party refused to obey his orders.
Both men have problems with migration. They face the arrival of new citizens with a very different outlook on politics from the long established British and French ideas of liberties, including the rights of journalists, women and gays.
Neither knows how to handle Putin or Trump, or indeed Xi Jinping, the looming new master of the world from China. Both men face challenges from the new ethnonationalist (and often racist) politics of 21st century populism. Macron has just made the first state visit to Britain by a French President in 17 years, arriving ahead of Donald Trump. The prickly US President has yet to decide how to react to what he may see as an Anglo-French snub.
Starmer hopes to get help from Macron in dealing with the influx of asylum seekers and economic migrants arriving in small boats from the beaches that evacuated 340,000 British, French and other European soldiers in June 1940. There is every reason for Macron to cooperate and show that the French police can control their coasts, instead of handing them over to criminal gangs.
Equally it would be no bad thing if Starmer could allow British musicians and artists to rejoin the circuit of French summer cultural festivals. Or he could allow youngsters again to study or spend gap years in France to improve their French, as his predecessor Tony Blair did as a young man.
French and other Europeans are baffled by Britain’s insistence that ID cards – paper or digital – are the work of the devil. From the point of view of Calais police, it means every migrant once in Britain can get a job, rent a flat and obtain health care, without ever having to prove they are legally in the country.
Two years ago Macron proposed that European troops should be deployed to Ukraine. At the time Britain was under the rule of Europhobe ministers who couldn’t make up their mind if Macron was “friend or foe”. The London defence establishment rubbished Macron’s idea, but Starmer has re-badged it as a “coalition of the willing”. The two men have brought together a powerful alliance in Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere around the world to make clear to Putin that his imperialist aggression should not succeed.
The question remains whether this new entente cordiale (or amicale, as Macron dubbed it at the state banquet in Windsor Castle) will make either leader more secure in the governance of his country or provide answers to the problems both nations face.
Denis MacShane is the former Minister of Europe and author of the first English biography of France’s president François Mitterrand.
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