One year into his term, French President Emmanuel Macron has set out to reform his country and the EU. Now he’s learning that progress in Europe moves at a snail’s pace, says DW’s Barbara Wesel.
He is still something of a political pop star. Despite a hint of exhaustion, the French president maintains his passion and fighting spirit for the European project. However, Emmanuel Macron has surely by now experienced how slow and frustrating EU reform is. The bloc creeps along while an unpredictable US president, threats of a trade war, high immigration, and crisis and war in the Middle East make citizens uneasy.
Eurozone stuck in the mud
Macron’s address to European Parliament only briefly mentioned his lauded eurozone reforms. He has realized that his hopes for an EU-level finance minister, a common EU budget and EU-level bank deposit insurance will have to be postponed. Angela Merkel’s ruling conservatives have put the brakes on those ideas, muting the German chancellor’s initial cautious praise for some of them. For German leaders, the priority is to protect Germany’s public finances from the potential risks posed by the rest of the EU.
Read more: Emmanuel Macron: ‘En Marche’ to Brussels?
On the surface it may seem that Merkel and Macron get along well on the European stage, appearing together warmly at summits. But there is little substance behind it. Merkel needs to take her own conservative party into consideration more than she so far has. At the finance ministry, the center-left Social Democrat Olaf Scholz is in charge, and he is of much the same vein as his conservative predecessor, Wolfgang Schäuble. There is nothing left of the bold, but largely undefined, promises made in the original government coalition agreement.
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