Kevin Allison is a Senior Editor for Signal. Based in Washington DC, he looks at how technology is reshaping global affairs. Kevin is also a Director in the Geo-Technology practice at Eurasia Group. Kevin holds degrees from the University of Missouri and from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He was also a Fulbright Scholar in Vienna, Austria and a 2015 Miller Journalism Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Prior to GZERO Media and Eurasia Group, Kevin was a journalist at Reuters and the Financial Times. He has lived in eight US states and has been an expat four times.
You’ve got to hand it to Emmanuel Macron (pictured above, on Monday): it takes serious nerve for a French President who is struggling in the polls to deliver a speech about the need to reform the welfare state from Versailles palace using cake as a rhetorical device. No, seriously – that really happened. Let’s assume that the 40-year-old former investment banker, who has already taken flak from domestic opponents for his aloof, allegedly king-like approach to the presidency, is acting rationally.
What message was he trying to send here?
We’ve noted before that Macron, like Donald Trump, is a political outsider who wants to project strength. By reveling in the ceremony and trappings of office – whether it’s riding a military jeep to his inauguration or walking between rows of ceremonial guards, at an estimated cost of $350,000, to deliver a State-of-the-Union-like address at Versailles – Macron is signaling that the xenophobic nationalists who are threatening to unwind decades of liberal democracy in Europe don’t have a monopoly on patriotism. There’s a risk that by trying too hard to inject gravitas into his presidency, he ends up alienating more voters than he charms. But it does help explain the puzzling optics.
