Three days before the second round of the legislative elections, the visit to kyiv by Emmanuel Macron, serving as Acting President of the EU, accompanied by Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany, and Mario Draghi, President of the Italian Council, is a ‘hinge’ event in the face of the announced change in the national political landscape.
Change with deep European, bilateral, multilateral, diplomatic and military dimensions.
On the eve of the trip to kyiv, Macron insisted on this point: “France’s military presence in Eastern Europe is part of our project to build a Europe of defense.” Military and diplomatic project.
The French ‘Caesar’ guns are playing an important role in the defense of eastern Ukraine, in the Donbass.
This military dimension also has a basic national and electoral dimension: France is the world’s second largest arms exporter. And Macron presents himself to public opinion as an important actor on the European scene, when his main rival, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is anti-European, pro-Bolivarian, anti-Atlantic Alliance.
From Germany, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeig, Südeutsche Zeitung, Tagesspiegel have recalled that the political ascendancy of Mélenchon, anti-European and anti-German, is a threat to the political construction of Europe.
Presenting himself in kyiv as acting president of the EU, accompanied by the German chancellor and the president of the Italian Council, Macron reminds public opinion, national and European, that the French presidency of the EU will culminate in a few days with the collective response to Ukraine’s European aspirations. Beyond any controversy, past or future, the French president reminds national voters that France’s place in the world depends on European solidarity, far removed from the anti-European and anti-Atlantic Alliance temptations of the extreme left and the extreme right-wing populists, who are the new emerging political forces.
The personal and presidential staging of the visit to kyiv recalls another electorally basic point: Macron acts as a ‘republican monarch’, giving the institutional function an evident European dimension, when his rivals, Mélenchon and Le Pen, continue to be installed in the pulpits provincials of a France remote and distant from the tragedy and the immense problems that loom over the future of the whole of Europe.
