Asked by a journalist about the international stature of General de Gaulle, Winston Churchill replied: “He is arrogant, selfish and considers himself the center of the universe. You are right, he is a great man!” In 2024, the german magazine Die Welt repeats the quote of the British Prime Minister, this time with another leader in the lead. “After six and a half years at the Elysée, we can wonder if this same description suits Emmanuel Macron: will he become a great man on the international scene? Or is he only entangled in shenanigans which will not produce any results? The German newspaper is rather enthusiastic about our head of state “who sells himself as the driving force behind a modern and sovereign Europe”, capable of speaking on par with the Russian Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Xi Jinping.
Less than a month before the European elections, the French president’s European voluntarism does not go unnoticed by our neighbors. After declaring at the Sorbonne that “Europe can die”, Emmanuel Macron offered himself the cover of The Economist to establish himself as the savior of the continent and the main opponent of the imperialist project of Putin’s Russia. New arms deliveries to Ukraine, European defense project and ambiguity left on the sending of ground troops: “All this is striking and marks an unusual desire in France to think outside European preconceptions”, decides the British weekly.
“Our continent is deadly, in danger and in decline, but fortunately Macron has a whole bunch of remedies,” smiled for her part New Zürcher Zeitung, for whom this Elysian verb translates “a truly Napoleonic sense of mission”. The major German-speaking daily newspaper in Switzerland notes that our president makes a specialty of “official gravedigger of institutions”, after having declared the brain death of NATO in 2019. It was, already, in The Economist. Since then, the Atlantic Alliance has largely regained its colors. Perhaps a good omen for the European Union.