Sincerely, Emmanuel Macron offers Europe an earnest recitation of his worst ideas.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sincerely-emmanuel-11551831254
As political campaign tactics go, we’ve seen better than the open letter that French President Emmanuel Macron sent this week laying out a pan-Europe agenda ahead of May’s European Parliament elections. He manages to combine bad ideas with off-putting self-promotion.
Mr. Macron is trying to rally voters around a centrist, “pro-European” message amid fears that euroskeptic parties could win a third or more of the seats in the next parliament. Violent protests against a fuel-tax hike at home have thwarted Mr. Macron’s effort to build a pan-European political movement, so he’s making do with the letter published in newspapers across the Continent in 22 languages. His platform is “freedom, protection and progress.”
Some ideas are merely impractical. European voters increasingly demand more effective border enforcement, especially after 2015’s migration crisis. Mr. Macron’s call for more stringent border controls around the passport-free European Schengen zone may resonate. But his demand for more burden-sharing in processing asylum claimants will flop. Voters in Poland don’t want to be obliged to house migrants that countries such as Germany or Italy have welcomed or proven powerless to stop.
Mr. Macron is worse on the economy. His protection-and-progress platform involves higher taxes for global tech companies, a European Union-wide minimum wage, greater trade protectionism to foster national champions, and a European Innovation Council to fund business investment. Showing he hasn’t learned from the revolt against his green-taxes debacle, he still wants Europe to go carbon-free by 2050.
This warmed-over statism is common in Europe but it’s especially disappointing from Mr. Macron. He started his presidential term in 2017 with a much better plan for reviving Europe’s fortunes: making France great again. He persuaded voters to embrace a major labor-law overhaul to rev up the French economy as a second motor for the eurozone, he faced down nationwide strikes by railway workers, and he had been due to advance welfare and pension reforms to balance Paris’s finances.
Further reforms are now in danger amid the fuel-tax protests and his focus on Europe. Mr. Macron may be right that Europeans want a Europe that protects them economically, but nothing protects like prosperity. If he’s serious about defending the European Union from its many critics, his supply-side restoration of the French economy is a better outlet for his energies.
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