Macron, Battling the Far Right at Home, Pushes for a Stronger Europe

Challenged by the extreme right and perhaps more vulnerable than at any time in his presidency, Emmanuel Macron of France sought renewed momentum on Thursday through a sweeping speech on the need for a more assertive Europe, a theme that he has pressed with urgency since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The nearly two-hour speech reflected Mr. Macron’s conviction that only a reinforced and “sovereign” European Union — a “Europe power,” as he puts it — can save the continent from irrelevancy in an unstable world that is dominated by the United States and China and confronting wars in Europe and the Middle East.

“We must be lucid about the fact that our Europe is mortal,” Mr. Macron declared before an audience of government ministers, European ambassadors and other dignitaries. “It can die. It can die and whether it does depends entirely on our choices.”

The speech, at the Sorbonne University in Paris, was a follow-up to one that Mr. Macron gave in the same location in September 2017. Then, Mr. Macron discussed the future of Europe as a young, recently elected and disruptive president still enjoying a political honeymoon.

Today, without an absolute majority in Parliament, and with his popularity falling after seven years in office, he has struggled over the past two years to give direction to his second term.

Coming less than two months before elections to the European Parliament on June 9, Mr. Macron’s decision to speak out was widely seen as a bid to bolster his centrist Renaissance party, which is placing a distant second in the latest polls behind the far-right National Rally party led by Jordan Bardella. Mr. Macron’s party is polling at about 17.5 percent of eligible voters; Mr. Bardella’s has about 30 percent.

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“Our Europe can die”: Macron’s dire message to the continent

IN 2017 EMMANUEL MACRON took to the stage under the domed amphitheatre of the Sorbonne in Paris to call for a more “sovereign”, autonomous Europe. Filled with as many abstract nouns as policy ideas, the speech came to mark the French president’s ambition for the European Union to toughen up, and stand on its own two feet. Seven years later, on April 25th, Mr Macron returned to the university with an altogether graver message: “Our Europe is mortal; it can die”.

The underlying thread in Mr Macron’s long speech was one of Europe’s fragility in a darker world. He referred at times to the European project, narrowly defined as the 27 members of the European Union. Its residents have over the decades come to assume that the EU is a fixed feature of the landscape; Mr Macron stressed that it is instead a construct that could, through the resurgence of nationalism, be undone. But he also spoke of Europe as a broader shared liberal-democratic space, “from Lisbon to Odessa”, a firm nod to the inclusion of war-battered Ukraine.