The folly of Macron’s Greenland visit

Emmanuel Macron spent his Sunday in Greenland on what can best be described as an anti-Trump visit. The French president dropped in on the Danish autonomous territory en route to this week’s G7 summit in Canada. Flanked by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s Premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Macron told reporters he was there in “solidarity” with Greenland.

Donald Trump has expressed his desire to annex the strategically important island but Macron said, “everybody thinks − in France, in the European Union − that Greenland is not to be sold, not to be taken.”

Macron is incapable of addressing France’s issues, so instead he visits far-flung corners of the earth where locals will clap, wave flags and afford him a warmth that he has long since lost in his homeland

Everybody? In truth very few people in France are losing sleep over Greenland. There are other more pressing issues: war in the Middle East, war in Ukraine, a cost of living crisis, the collapse of the country’s borders and, as Macron himself admitted last week “a senseless outpouring of violence”.

The president made that statement hours after a playground supervisor had been fatally stabbed, with a 14-year-old boy charged with his murder. This is the latest act of appalling brutality that has shaken France in recent years.

Macron is incapable of addressing any of these issues so instead he visits the more far-flung corners of the earth where locals will clap, wave flags and afford him a warmth that he has long since lost in his homeland.

As Macron flew to Greenland a Sunday newspaper published an opinion poll that revealed his approval rating is at 21 per cent, a point above the record low of 2018, the year of the Yellow Vest crisis.

The same poll found that the most popular politician is Bruno Retailleau, the straight-talking Interior Minister. Retailleau regularly talks about the “Mexicanisation” of France, and the  “barbarians” who make the lives of the majority a misery. Macron, on the other hand, believes that there is nothing much wrong with France. Recently he declared that the French were being “brainwashed” by the “tyranny” of right-wing news channels into believing the country was being overrun by illegal immigrants, drug cartels and hoodlums. The timing of the president’s comments couldn’t have been more inopportune, coming shortly before the playground assistant was murdered outside the school gate.

Macron is also out of step with his country when it comes to the environment. At the end of last month, parliament voted to abolish low-emission zones, one of Macron’s flagship policies during his first term.

Some of his own centrist MPs voted with the centre-right Republicans and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally to defeat a policy they said targeted the poorest members of society. The zones, which began in 2019 and now encompass every urban area with a population above 150,000, ban cars registered before 1997.

Macron described the vote as an “historic error”, adding that “ecology necessarily means constraints”. His critics demur. The campaign to scrap the low-emission zones was led by the writer Alexandre Jardin. He accused Macron and his ilk of transforming green issues “into a sport for the rich”.

Jardin last week announced that his next target is wind farms, many more of which are planned by Macron. Critics claim they are unreliable and expensive, and likely to double consumers’ bills. Wind farms, declared Jardin, are a “green bobo [bourgeois bohemian] utopia, financed to the tune of billions… by whom? The poor, of course.”

Within months of becoming president in 2017 Macron was being characterised as a privileged former banker and the “president of the rich”. There is nothing unusual in that; most world leaders aren’t short of a few bob, least of all Trump, who last week reported assets worth at least $1.6 billion.

The difference between Trump and Macron, however, is that the American president acts in the interest of the less affluent, those most affected by mass immigration, deindustrialization and net zero dogma.

Macron ignores anxieties about these issues. He remains the president of the rich, feted in Greenland but loathed in France.