Macron and Starmer are already yesterday’s men

One is a lame-duck premier, historically unpopular, incapable of governing, and assailed by the populist right and a deranged left. The other is a lame-duck premier, historically unpopular, incapable of governing, and assailed by the populist right and a deranged left. What a pair Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron make.

Macron’s speech to the British Houses of Parliament yesterday has prompted a collective swoon from shallow centrists, who continue to see European leaders as so much slicker and more impressive than our own (a view that can only be sustained by total ignorance of contemporary continental politics and / or a girlish susceptibility to an accent). Following a string of defeats for Starmer, the French president appeared to the British great and good to be everything our embattled prime minister is not. Suave, articulate, a leader; speaking more fluently in his heavily accented English than MDF Starmer has ever managed in his native tongue.

But in truth, they are both scions of an order that is fast dying out. Technocrats in a populist age, clinging to their failed orthodoxies even as their baleful effects are being exposed for all to see. Both were briefly hailed as the return of ‘liberal’, pro-EU, competent governance, only to be exposed as bunglers incapable of doing anything, other than enraging an already enraged electorate. Starmer simply got there quicker, and with fewer Rousseau references. The turd sans the polish.

Macron, eight years into his 10-year presidency, has tried and failed to reform the French state, tried and failed to turn the EU into a genuine superpower, tried and failed to defeat populism. He was depicted walking on water by The Economist in 2017, after he prevailed over Marine Le Pen in the presidential election and supposedly delivered France from the populist derangement Britain had been consumed by the previous summer. All these years on and the National Rally has won a European election and is within striking distance of the Élysée, battling it out not with Macron’s party but with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing alliance.

Macron couldn’t resist a bit of crowing about Brexit yesterday. After all, the ascendancy of Keir ‘second referendum’ Starmer to No10 Downing Street is undoubtedly a boon to the EU, which has set about pressing its advantage with alarming ease. ‘The point is not to diverge’, said Macron in his speech. He needn’t have bothered. Starmer, if his recent sell-out deal with the EU is anything to go by, is desperate to drag us back into Brussels’ regulatory orbit, even if it comes at the cost of democracy and prosperity. But given Macron’s successor could well find him or herself negotiating with prime minister Nigel Farage, declaring victory over Brexit seems a little premature. Voters have had enough of EU-style globalism and they will continue to find ways to make that known at the ballot box.

In truth, this speech was less a victory lap than a death rattle. You could hear it in Macron’s thinly veiled appeals to authoritarianism, demanding governments crack down on free speech and reform their defective publics. Europe’s ‘democratic models’, he said, were being threatened by ‘foreign interference, information manipulation, domination of minds by negative emotions and addictions to social media’. Translation: we must defend democracy from the voters, those dumb fucks. Naturally, all of Brussels’ censorious efforts so far have failed spectacularly, with electoral revolts erupting north, south, east and west, despite new regulations on social media and state intimidation of insurgents. The weaker the elites become, the more authoritarian they become.

Say what you will about Emmanuel Macron, at least he knows his audience. His lofty rhetoric about Europe, democracy and the holy ‘green transition’ might have been shallow, deluded and hypocritical. But the shallow, deluded and hypocritical of SW1 certainly lapped it up. There was even a reference to every British politician’s new favourite ‘documentary’, Adolescence, presumably to make sure Starmer was still awake. But to ordinary people outside of Westminster’s gilded halls – from Manchester to Marseille – it will have sounded like the yammerings of an elite whose time is finally up.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater